Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  I don’t feel sorry for him. Instead, I feel a fierce rage, made fiercer by coming face-to-face with its target. These are strong feelings, but they are mine and they are human. They belong to me and I am not afraid.

  I say nothing to Fletcher. I do nothing to help him. I care about him not at all.

  Stepping round the pools and splashes of his blood, careful not to make a footprint, I make for the flight of steps heading down to the cellar.

  I have my gun in a double grip now, but it has become part of me. An instinct. A single being. I am Lev and my name is vengeance. What lies below me is worse, I know it, than anything that lies bleeding above. I kick open the cellar door and sweep the room through the sights of my gun.

  I have found what I came for.

  And what I find is horror. A horror beyond description. A horror which I know, even before my gunsight has finished sweeping the room, will last the rest of my days. Time’s ruinous fingers may one day muddle and obscure this moment, but what has been done here can never be set to rights, can never be undone.

  What I see is four women. They are naked, except for long T-shirts, white once but grubby now. Each of the women is chained by her ankle to an iron hoop set into the wall. The floor is covered in straw. Lots of it, like in a freshly prepared cow barn. A bucket full of shit and piss steams in the corner under a single tiny window. The women are dirty. Their hair is rank and snarled. They’re all too thin. All bruised, some nastily. They’ve got the staring eyes of people who are shocked beyond shock, and steaming high on heroin to boot. There are ten iron hoops altogether. Six of them lie empty.

  I take all this in and, in a movement as natural and spontaneous as drawing breath, I vomit. A single reflexive gag that splatters into the straw at my feet. Just one. Time is moving ahead again with its jerky quantum beat, and the reflex that made me retch is already jerking away from me into the past.

  So it’s to be like this, is it? I’ve got to deal not just with Fletcher but with all Sikorsky’s ugly buddies too. So be it. Fuck ’em all, every one. It is what it is and I am ready. I just hope Roberts’s shitty little trawler isn’t yet full. If it is, then I’ll hate myself forever for arriving too late.

  It’s one of those situations, one of those blessed situations, where for once my instincts move faster and more wisely than my brain.

  Before I know it, I’m signaling shush to the women—I doubt if any of them speak much English—and ripping my clothes off as fast as I can, hurling them into the angle of the cellar door, where they can’t be seen from the stairs. There’s a stack of more filthy white T-shirts in the corner of the room, piled on top of some Army surplus gray blankets. I grab one of the T-shirts and put it on. I hate the feel of it, the way it makes a slave of me, but in this place slaves are invisible, and invisibility is my friend.

  I frisk my own clothes to grab ammo from my jacket pocket, then decide I need my boots, and put them on again. There are only ten bullets in my gun. If it comes to unarmed combat, I’ll be more effective if I can kick. Kneecaps, testicles, windpipes.

  I make for the far corner of the room. There’s a single bulb in the center of the ceiling, but it doesn’t cast much light in my corner. I lie down, covering my booted feet with a blanket.

  I make the shush signal hard and aggressively to the women, two of whom have started talking fast in what I think might be Romanian. They don’t stop talking, but then I aim my gun at their heads and they do. They are still all staring at me, and I try to gesture at them to look away. I’m only half successful, but half is better than not at all.

  I lie there, in the straw, in the fuck pit created by Brendan Rattigan.

  A place for him to bring girls from Eastern Europe. A place to get them high on heroin, to rape them, abuse them, half-starve them, knock them around, until they dropped dead or until he decided he wanted a fresh supply. Rattigan and whichever of his buddies happened to amuse themselves the same way. Rattigan and his rich little fuck buddies. Fuck buddies who pay 10 percent income tax, because they’ve got the same lawyers as he had.

  I don’t know if Fletcher shared these tastes, or if he was just happy to be Rattigan’s fixer, the guy who made it all happen. I’m guessing a bit of both, but Fletcher was only ever really the ops man. The guy who got the girls onto the ships, then off again. A shipping guy. The logistics man.

  Then Rattigan drops into the sea. Properly dead. No messing around. Just a regular plane crash. Stupid sod probably too vain to put on a life jacket, too arrogant to take orders from his pilot. And, with the boss’s body still bouncing around the floor of the Severn Estuary, the idiot Fletcher, a pygmy who mistook himself for a giant, decided to go it alone. Presumably there were clients that Rattigan chose to bill. Perhaps they chose to pay. Perhaps Fletcher thought this was a business venture he could expand.

  A mistake. The worst of his life—a mistake which has currently cost him his ears, tongue, testicles, and fingers, not to mention the blood blackening the floorboards upstairs. Did Fletcher decide to keep the boss’s name? Rattigan’s name? Quite possibly. Ioana Balcescu reacted to Rattigan’s name as though he were alive. Perhaps Fletcher pretended that the boss had faked his own death, was still alive and still operating. Or maybe Balcescu was just behind the times. Either way, her reaction was one of the clues that led me to this place.

  Anyway, for a while, Fletcher made some money. The business worked. But if you want to play hardball with the gangsters of Kaliningrad, you’ve got to be as tough and as hard and as ruthless as them. Rattigan was. He had the cash. More than that, he had the ability, the charisma, the swaggering drive, the aggression. And Fletcher was a pygmy waddling around in the clothes of a giant. Before too long, he tripped over his own hem, and his nice Russian friends took advantage. Probably they didn’t like someone making a fool of them. More than likely, they thought if Fletcher had an operation that was making money for him, it would make even more money for them. They decided to march in, take over Fletcher’s turf, tighten up.

  Janet Mancini was the first victim. That debit card of Rattigan’s. Once upon a time, he screwed her, told her more than he should have but let her live. Janet, foolish girl, said more than she should have—to her friend, Stacey Edwards, I’d guess—and word got back to the lads from Russia. She heard a rumor that she was in danger. Escaped to her squat, but she needed to be on a different continent. A different street wouldn’t do. The people hunting her tracked her down and killed her. April too, for no reason beyond ensuring that her little six-year-old mouth kept its silence. No doubt Sikorsky was their killer, but he was just a hired man, small fry. The Mancini case, for me, was never about Sikorsky.

  The same thing with Stacey Edwards. She talked too much. Threw accusations around. Made a noise. Sikorsky visited her too. Killed her in a way that sent a signal. The sort of signal that the Russian boys are so good at sending. Silence, or else.

  All this I’d pretty much worked out. Speculation, most of it, as D.C.I. Jackson would certainly have told me, but you can’t always reach the truth—certainly no interesting truth—without a little wild surmise along the way. Perhaps the exact story will prove to be a little different in minor respects, but I’d bet my life that I’ve got the gist right. More than likely, the full details will never emerge. They usually don’t.

  But I hadn’t reckoned on this particular endgame. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Russian cleanup would extend out here. I hadn’t guessed they might be this effective and this ruthless. I hadn’t thought laterally enough, because I thought the pygmy Fletcher would represent my only opposition.

  More fool me. But you live and learn, as my granny would say. Of course it might be die and learn in this particular instance, but there are worse things than being dead, as I know better than most.

  I wriggle down into the straw. I feel the prickle of its sharp ends through my T-shirt. Straw against my breasts and thighs and belly. You couldn’t live for long like this and not become half beast. Kept alive so a bunc
h of rich guys could fuck you, then beat you, then dump your body out at sea when they were done. It would be hard to stay human, living like that, dying like that.

  The room is silent now. The two Romanians have ceased their chatter.

  The gulls outside are inaudible here. There’s just the tick of straw settling down and possibly, unless it’s my imagination, the drip of Fletcher’s blood from upstairs.

  I remember the targets at the firing range. Black and white. Black to congratulate you for a chest shot. White to mark you down for a shot anywhere else. I visualize my targets. Imagine their dark black centers. Bring to mind all the bull’s-eyes I scored, at longer range and in worse light conditions, that night in Llangattock.

  Once again, I am ready. I am perfectly still and perfectly ready.

  It takes longer than I think. Longer than I want. Perhaps my perceptions of time are altered. Perhaps the Russians are taking their boat out into the Irish Sea before coming back here. Or perhaps something else. Maybe something obvious, like stopping for tea or having a bite to eat. Must take it out of you, after all, slicing Fletcher’s body parts off, hauling women off to Roberts’s handy little motorboat. A comrade must want a bite to eat after all that work. Black tea and jam.

  I don’t know how long it is, but I’d guess an hour, then I hear boots on the steps outside, the door opening and voices.

  Voices and laughter. I don’t recognize the words, but I guess from the tone that they’re talking to Fletcher. Laughing at him.

  I hope so. I hope Fletcher is still alive. I want him alive, and mute, and crippled, and behind bars for the rest of a very long life. He deserves no mercy.

  Then the boots and the voices come downstairs.

  My heart rate doesn’t change. There is no separation between me and my feelings. For once in my life, I have no difficulty at all in feeling alive, in feeling the way a human is meant to feel. It sounds crazy to say it, but I feel at peace. Integrated.

  They are still talking as they come down the steps. Stone steps, with a stone wall on either side, and a cellar all of stone as well. The sound of these voices is tubular, echoey. Hard to gauge how distant they are.

  I have my face pressed down into the straw. To these men, one more slave woman is just a counting error. But my rock-chick makeup will give me away, and I want that moment to be as late as possible, so I deliberately deprive myself of a full view.

  These are excuses perhaps. Excuses for getting my timing a second or so out. But I don’t blame myself. I’m not Lev. This is my first time with this kind of thing, and the first time is bound to be a learning experience.

  I assume that there are two men. The two I saw taking the girl onto Roberts’s boat, now come back to collect the next one.

  I wait for both men to enter the cellar. If they’ve noticed that there are the wrong number of women here, they haven’t yet given any sign of it. The man in front has a leather jacket on over a white T-shirt. The one behind is shorter, and I don’t see him properly. They are killers. Russian killers. Sikorsky’s chums here to complete their business.

  I move. Still lying prone, I sweep my gun out in front of me. Aim up, at the first man’s chest. Not black-on-white, the way it was at the firing range. Here, the man’s white T-shirt is the target, and at this range I cannot possibly miss.

  I fire.

  I can’t even hear the shot. My senses are running way ahead of my brain. They’re telling me what I need to know and what I don’t. The concussion of the shot is irrelevant. All that matters is that it’s a perfect bull’s-eye. A chest shot. Lethal.

  The man goes down, and I’m leaping up, firing as I move.

  The second man is moving too. Jumping back to the cellar steps. My first shot misses altogether. My second shot hits him in the hip. My third in the leg.

  If I had wanted to put that third shot into the chest, I could have. But I didn’t. I want there to be nothing swift about the way that justice claims these men. The first man had to die. There was no other practical solution. The second one has his hip smashed and his thigh pulverized. He’s not going anywhere.

  And fool that I am, I think I’m done. This is where Lev would be still moving. Reloading. Keeping the initiative. This is where I’m thinking, Thank fuck, I’m finished.

  And I almost am.

  Mr. Russian the Third comes plunging down the stairs, a gun in his hand, aiming to kill me. He doesn’t only because he’s temporarily confused. He must have come down expecting a man, or at the very least someone with proper clothes on. All he finds are five half-naked women, and it takes him a second too long to work out which of them has been mowing down his buddies.

  He shoots. I shoot.

  The air is ablaze with sound. So loud that I register the concussion more than the noise itself. As if some natural disaster—a flood, a hurricane, an earthquake—were translated into sound and compressed into this narrow gap of time and space.

  I don’t even know what is happening.

  Don’t know until the hammer of my gun clicks and clicks and clicks on emptiness.

  Don’t know until I notice that the man I was shooting at has a smashed hand, a smashed shoulder, and a pair of bullet wounds that straddle the gap between his lung and his kidney. He’s not shooting. He’s not standing. He’s not even moving much, unless you count his good hand, which keeps touching different parts of his body and coming away crimson and horrified.

  All the time I was shooting, I thought he was shooting back at me. I have to check my own body, by eye and by hand, to convince myself I haven’t been hit. I realize that, thanks to my tiny advantage, my having enjoyed a clear target and him being confused by a choice of five, he never even got a shot off. I’m standing over him as I work all this out, watching blood spurt from his belly, pulsing in time with his heart.

  But my brain is starting to engage properly now. My moment of triumph is over, and there were steps up above me just now, running hard out of the lighthouse.

  I snap handcuffs over the two wounded men, cuffing each man to the other. I try to reload my gun, but my hands are shaking so much I can’t do anything right. Instead, I grab the Russian’s gun, which lies useless on the floor, and then I’m upstairs. Running past Fletcher. Down the steps and out of the lighthouse. Through the gate, which has been unlocked and is swinging open.

  It’s the cliff path I’m headed for.

  I don’t run hard. I’m not sprinting. I’m not in good enough shape to run at maximum pelt and then be useful for anything afterward. A couple of times, when the view widens, I see a man running ahead of me. Jeans and a T-shirt. He can’t have a gun, I think, or he wouldn’t be running.

  The ground underfoot is okay. It’s dry enough, and there’s a proper path. But it’s not even. Rocks protrude. There’s churned ground where puddles once lay. Gorse roots and sudden twists. I need to keep my eyes on the path in front of me, so I’m able to look ahead less than I’d prefer.

  Then I round a bend and come face-to-face with the man.

  Waiting for me.

  He has no gun, but he has an ax. Snatched from the woodpile at the lighthouse, I guess.

  I raise my gun and fire.

  Nothing happens. There’s no bullet in the chamber. I pull the trigger again, and still nothing happens. Apart from pulling the trigger, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do next.

  If I had more time, I’d sit down with the gun on my lap. Figure it out. It can’t be a very complicated device, this gun. I surely can manage it.

  But I have no time. I know it and the man knows it. I toss the gun far back into the field behind me, depriving my opponent of a weapon that he presumably does know how to use, but that’s not much of a victory at this stage.

  The man grins. He’s not even swift or oblique in his triumph. He’s thinking, I’ve got the bitch and I can take my time. Take my time and enjoy it.

  He lifts the ax overhead. It’s a long-handled thing, not a hatchet. Its head and shaft are gray-brown, a tone equidis
tant between wood and rust. The sun lies behind the man and the ax, so he’s just silhouette, and his shadow etches its double on the grass.

  I suddenly realize, This is Sikorsky. He hasn’t escaped. He’s not in Poland or Russia. He’s here in Pembrokeshire, completing his assignment.

  I think, I’m stupid, but you’re stupider.

  Something Lev taught me. A distrust of long-handled weapons. They feel good in the hand, but they take too long to swing. You expose yourself as you swing them. Too easy to evade, and especially for me. Small fighters lack power, but we move faster. Right now, I’d sooner have speed than power.

  I give Sikorsky his moment. The ax head up in the sun. The semi-naked woman in front of him. A lovely day for murder.

  “Zdravstvuite, Karol,” I say, pleasantly.

  He swings. His movement is oversignaled. Too big and too slow. I move to one side, deflecting the shaft with an arm. At the same time, I kick hard at his shin. As hard as I can. As hard as I’ve ever kicked.

  It’s not the best move in the world. A good kick at a kneecap has more scope to disable. But you can’t really miss a shin, and right now I’m in risk-minimization mode. The boots I’m wearing today were ones adapted for me by Lev himself. Steel-tipped. Nasty.

  The Russian discovers the meaning of pain and for a second or two is out of action with it.

  All the time in the world.

  Another hard kick to his other shin brings him to his knees, then I get a clear shot at his testicles and take it. As he comes down, his chin moves toward me, and that gets a hammering as well. He’s on the ground moaning now, so I kick him once more on the side of his head, hard. Steel toe cap connecting with bone. His skull jerking back and a spray of blood droplets making patterns in the sun.