“What was that about?” I murmur.
“What was what?” She turns to stare at me in the darkness, but I avoid making eye contact.
“The thing with the doorman.”
“It’s been a hard day, and American Airlines doesn’t cater for my special dietary requirements.”
“Really?” I stare at her. “I don’t know how you can live with yourself.”
“Marc over there—” she jerks her head almost imperceptibly, back towards the door “—likes to think of himself as a lone wolf. He’s twenty-five and he got the job here after a dishonorable discharge from the French paratroops. He served two years of a five-year sentence first. You wouldn’t believe the things that happen on UN peacekeeping missions . . .”
She pauses and takes a tiny sip of her drink before continuing. Her voice is over-controlled and just loud enough to hear above the band: “He’s not in contact with his family back in Lyon because his father kicked him out of the house when he discovered what he did to his younger sister. He lives alone in a room above a bike repair shop. When a mark runs out of cash and tries to stiff the house, they sometimes send Marc around to explain the facts of life. Marc enjoys his work. He prefers to use a cordless hammer-drill with a blunt three-eighths bit. Twice a week he goes and fucks a local whore, if he’s got the money. If he hasn’t got the money, he picks up tourist women looking for a good time: usually he takes their money and leaves their flight vouchers, but twice in the past year he’s taken them for an early morning boat ride, which they probably didn’t appreciate on account of being tied up and out of their skulls on Rohypnol. He’s got an eight-foot dinghy and he knows about a bay out near North Point where some people he doesn’t know by name will pay him good money for single women nobody will miss.” She touches my arm. “Nobody is going to miss him, Bob.”
“You—” I bite my tongue.
“You’re learning.” She smiles tensely. “Another couple of weeks and you might even get it.”
I swallow bile. “Where’s Billington?”
“All in good time,” she croons in a low singsong voice that sends chills up and down my spine. Then she turns towards the baccarat table.
The croupier is shuffling several decks of cards together in the middle of the kidney-shaped table. A half-dozen players and their hangers-on watch with feigned boredom and avaricious eyes: leisure-suit layabouts, two or three gray-haired pensioners, a fellow who looks like a weasel in a dinner jacket, and a woman with a face like a hatchet. I hang back while Ramona explains things in a monotone in the back of my head—it sounds like she’s quoting someone: ★★‘It’s much the same as any other gambling game. The odds against the banker and the player are more or less even. Only a run against either can be decisive and “break the bank” or break the players.’ That’s Ian Fleming, by the way.★★
★★Who, the guy with the face ... ?★★
★★No, the guy I was quoting. He knew his theory but he wasn’t as competent at the practicalities. During the Second World War he ran a scheme to get British agents in neutral ports to gamble their Abwehr rivals into bankruptcy. Didn’t work. And don’t even think about trying that on Billington.★★
The croupier raises a hand and asks who’s holding the bank. Hatchet-Face nods. I look at the pile of chips in front of her. It’s worth twice my department’s annual budget. She doesn’t notice me staring so I look away quickly.
“So how does it go now?” I ask Ramona quietly. She’s scanning the crowd as if looking for an absent friend. She smiles faintly and takes my hand, forcing me to sidle uncomfortably close.
“Make like we’re a couple,” she whispers, still smiling. “Okay, watch carefully. The woman who’s the banker is betting against the other gamblers. She’s got the shoe with six packs of cards in it—shuffled by the croupier and double-checked by everyone else. Witnesses. Anyway, she’s about to—”
Hatchet-Face clears her throat. “Five grand.” There’s a wave of muttering among the other gamblers, then one of the pensioners nods and says, “Five,” pushing a stack of chips forwards.
Ramona: “She opened with a bank of five thousand dollars. That’s what she’s wagering. Blue-Rinse has accepted. If nobody accepted on their own, they could club together until they match the five thousand between them.”
“Ri-ight.” I frown, staring at the chips. Laundry pay scales are British civil service level—if I didn’t have the subsidized safe house, or if Mo wasn’t working, we wouldn’t be able to afford to live comfortably in London. What’s already on the table is about a month’s gross income for both of us, and this is just the opening round. Suddenly I feel very cold and exposed. I’m out of my depth here.
Hatchet-Face deals four cards from the shoe, laying two of them facedown in front of Blue-Rinse, and the other two cards in front of herself. Blue-Rinse picks her cards up and looks at them, then lays them facedown again and taps them.
“The idea is to get a hand that adds up to nine points, or closest to nine points. The banker doesn’t get to check his cards until the players declare. Aces are low, house cards are zero, and you’re only looking at the least significant digit: a five and a seven make two, not twelve. The player can play her hand, or ask for another card—like that—and then—she’s turning.”
Blue-Rinse has turned over her three cards. She’s got a queen, a two, and a five. Hatchet-Face doesn’t smile as she turns her own cards over to reveal two threes and a two. The croupier rakes the chips over towards her: Blue-Rinse doesn’t bat an eyelid.
I stare fixedly at the shoe. They’re nuts. Completely insane! I don’t get this gambling thing. Didn’t these people study statistics at university? Evidently not . . .
“Come on,” Ramona says quietly. “Back to the bar, or they’ll start to wonder why we’re not joining in.”
“Why aren’t we?” I ask her as she retreats.
“They don’t pay me enough.”
“Me neither.” I hurry to catch up.
“And here I was thinking you worked for the folks who gave us James Bond.”
“You know damn well that if Bond auditioned for a secret service job they’d tell him to piss off. We don’t need upper-class twits with gambling and fast car habits who think that all problems can be solved at gunpoint and who go rogue at the drop of a mission abort code.”
“No, really?” She gives me an old-fashioned look.
“Right.” I find myself grinning. “They go for quiet, bookish accountant-types, lots of attention to detail, no imagination, that kind of thing.”
“Quiet, bookish accountant-types who’re on drinking terms with the headbangers from Two-One SAS and are field-certified to Grade Four in occult combat technology?”
I may have done a couple of training courses at Dunwich but that doesn’t mean I’ve graduated to breathing seawater, much less inhaling vodka martinis. When I stop spluttering Ramona is looking away from me, whistling tunelessly and tapping her toes. I glare at her, and I’m about to give up on it as a bad job when I see who she’s watching. “Is that Billington?” I ask.
“Yep, that’s him. Aged sixty-two, looks forty-five.”
Ellis Billington is rather hard to miss. Even if I didn’t recognize his face from the cover of Computer Weekly, it’d be pretty obvious that he was a big cheese. There’s a nasty face-lift in a big frock hanging on his left arm, a briefcase-toting woman in wire-frame spectacles and a tailored suit that screams lawyer shadowing him, and a pair of thugs to either side, who wear their tuxedos like uniforms and have wires looped around their ears. A gaggle of Bright Young Things in cocktail dresses and tuxes bring up the rear, like courtiers basking in the reflected glory of a medieval monarch; the dubious doorman Ramona fingered for her midnight snack is oozing up to one of them. Billington himself has a distinguished silver-streaked hairdo that looks like he bought it at John DeLorean’s yard sale and feeds it raw liver twice a day. For all that, he looks trim and fit—almost unnaturally well preserved for his age.
“What now?” I ask her. I can see a guy who looks like the president of the casino threading his way across the floor towards Billington.
“We go say hello.” And before I can stop her she’s off across the floor like a missile. I scramble along in her wake, dodging dowagers, trying not to spill my drink—but instead of homing in on Billington she makes a beeline towards the Face Lift That Walks Like a Lady. “Eileen!” squeaks Ramona, coming over all blonde. “Why, if this isn’t a complete surprise!”
Eileen Billington—for it is she—turns on Ramona like a cornered rattlesnake, then suddenly smiles and switches on the sweetness and light: “Why, it’s Mona! Upon my word, I do declare!” They circle each other for a few seconds, sparring congenially and exchanging polite nothings while the courtier-yuppies home in on the baccarat table. I notice Billington’s attorney exchanging words with her boss and then departing towards the casino office. Then I see Billington look at me. I take a deep breath and nod at him.
“You’re with her.” He jerks his chin at Ramona. “Do you know what she is?” He sounds dryly amused.
“Yes.” I blink. “Ellis Billington, I presume?”
He looks me in the eye and it feels like a punch in the gut. Up close he doesn’t look human. His pupils are a muddy gray-brown, and slotted vertically: I’ve seen that before in folks who’ve had an operation to correct nystagmus, but somehow on Billington it looks too natural to be the aftereffect of surgery. “Who are you?” he demands.
“Howard—Bob Howard. Capital Laundry Services, import /export division.”
I manage to make a dog-eared business card appear between my fingers. He raises an eyebrow and takes it. “I didn’t know you people traded over here.”
“Oh, we trade all over.” I force myself to smile. “I sat through a most interesting presentation yesterday. My colleagues were absolutely mesmerized.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I take half a step back, but Ramona and Eileen are laughing loudly over some shared confidence behind me: there’s no escape from his lizardlike stare. Then he seems to reach some decision, and lets me down gently: “But that’s not surprising, is it? My companies have so many subsidiaries, doing so many things, that it’s hard to keep track of them all.” He shrugs, an aw-shucks gesture quite at odds with the rest of his mannerisms, and produces a grin from wherever he keeps his spare faces when he isn’t wearing them. “Are you here for the sunshine and sea, Mr. Howard? Or are you here to play games?”
“A bit of both.” I drain my cocktail glass. Behind him, his lawyer is approaching, the casino president at her elbow. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from business, so . . .”
“Perhaps later.” His smile turns almost sincere for a split second as he turns aside: “Now, if you’ll excuse me?”
I find myself staring at his retreating back. Seconds later Ramona takes hold of my elbow and twists it, gently steering me through the crowd towards the open glass doors leading onto the balcony at the back of the casino floor. “Come on,” she says quietly. The courtiers have formed an attentive wall around the fourth Mrs. Billington, who is getting ready to recycle some of her husband’s money through his bank. I let Ramona lead me outside.
“You know her!” I accuse.
“Of course I damn well know her!” Ramona leans against the stone railing that overhangs the beach, staring at me from arm’s length. My heart’s pounding and I feel dizzy with relief over having escaped Billington’s scrutiny. He was perfectly polite but when he looked at me I felt like a bug on a microscope slide, pinned down by brilliant searchlights for scrutiny by a vast, unsympathetic intellect: trapped with nowhere to hide. “My department spent sixty thousand bucks setting up the first introduction at a congressman’s fund-raiser two weeks ago, just so she’d recognize me tonight. You didn’t think we’d come here without doing the groundwork first?”
“Nobody tells me these things,” I complain. “I’m flailing around in the dark!”
“Don’t sweat it.” Suddenly she goes all apologetic on me, as if I’m a puppy who doesn’t know any better than to widdle on the living room carpet: “It’s all part of the process.”
“What process?” I stare her in the eyes, trying to ignore the effects of the glamour that tells me she’s the most amazingly beautiful woman I’ve ever met.
“The process that I’m not allowed to tell you about.” Is that genuine regret in her eyes? “I’m sorry.” She lowers her eyelashes. I track down instinctively, and find myself staring into the depths of her cleavage.
“Great,” I say bitterly. “I’ve got a station chief who’s as mad as a fish, an incomplete briefing, and a gambling-obsessed billionaire to out-bluff. And you can’t fucking tell me what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“No,” she says, in a thin, hopeless tone. And to my complete surprise she leans forwards, wraps her arms around me, props her chin on my shoulder, and begins to weep silently.
This is the final straw. I have been clawed at by zombies, condescended to by Brains, shipped off to the Caribbean and lectured in my sleep by Angleton, introduced to an executive with the eyes of a poisonous reptile, and ranted at by an old-school spook who’s fallen in the bottle—but those are all part of the job. This isn’t. There’s no briefing sheet on what to do when a supernatural soul-sucking horror disguised as a beautiful woman starts crying on your shoulder. Ramona sobs silently while I stand there, paralyzed by indecision, self-doubt, and jet lag. Finally I do the only thing I can think of and wrap my arms round her shoulders. “There, there,” I mutter, utterly unsure what I’m saying: “It’s going to be all right. Whatever it is.”
“No, it isn’t,” she sniffles quietly. “It’s never going to be all right.” Then she straightens up. “I need to blow my nose.”
I can take a hint: I let go and take a step back. “Do you want to talk?”
She pulls a hand-sized pack of tissues out of her bag and dabs at her eyes carefully.
“Do I want to talk?” She sniffs, then chuckles. Evidently something I said amused her. “No, Bob, I don’t want to talk.” She blows her nose. “You’re far too nice for this. Go to bed.”
“Too nice for what?” These dark hints of hers are getting really annoying, but I’m upset and concerned now that she’s pulling herself together; I feel like I’ve just sat some kind of exam and failed it, without even knowing what subject I’m being tested on.
“Go to bed,” she repeats, a trifle more forcefully. “I haven’t eaten yet. Don’t tempt me.”
I beat a hasty retreat back through the casino. On my way out, I go through the side room where they keep the slot machines. I pass Pinky—at least, I’m half-sure it’s Pinky—creating a near riot among the blue-rinse set by playing an entire row of one-armed bandits in sequence and winning big on each one. I don’t think he notices me. Just as well: I’m not in the mood for small talk right now.
Damn it, I know it’s just the effects of a class three glamour, but I can’t stop thinking about Ramona—and Mo’s flying in tomorrow.
6.
CHARLIE VICTOR
I MAKE IT BACK TO MY HOTEL ROOM WITHOUT getting lost, falling asleep on my feet, or accidentally looking at the screen saver. I slump in the chair for a while, but there’s nothing on TV except an adventure movie starring George Lazenby, and it’ll take more than that to keep me awake. So I hang out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, undress, and go to bed.
I fall asleep almost instantly, but it’s not very restful because I’m in someone else’s head, and I really don’t want to be there. Last time this happened, the fifty-something engineering salesman from Düsseldorf trapping off with the blonde call girl was just sad, and a bit pathetic on the side; this time it feels dirty. I (no, he: I struggle to hold myself aside from his sense of self) work out daily in a gym round the corner from the casino before I go in to work, and it’s not just pumping iron and running on a track—there’s stuff I don’t recognize, practice routines with odd twisting and punching
and kicking motions, somatic memories of beating people up and the warm sensual excitement that floods me when I stomp some fucking idiot for getting in my face. I’ve had a call from the customer, and I’m about ready to go off work and go looking for the merchandise he wants, when this blonde American princess comes out of the salle and what do you know, but she’s giving me a come-on? She’s lost the rich nerd she showed up with, and good riddance; guess I’ll have to take her home and that means . . . yeah, she’ll do. Two birds, one stone, so to speak. Or two stones, in my case. Mind you, she’s a customer—I’ll just have to be discreet. So I smile at her and make nicey-nice while she giggles, then I offer to buy her a drink and she says, “Yes,” and I tell her to meet me over the road at the Sunset Beach Bar so I can show her the town. She heads off, shaking her booty, and I go and get squared away. Time to do another line of Charlie in the john.
Checking out, walking over the road, I get that thrill of arousal. I’m on top of the world again with cold fire coursing through my veins, like the time in the village near Bujumbura when Jacques and I caught that kid stealing and we—the memory skids away from me as if it’s made of grease, only an echo of the blood and shit-smell of it and the screams lingering in my ears—and I get the hot tension again, like lightning seeking a path to earth. Sex, that’ll help. Long as she doesn’t make a fuss.
She’s waiting for me on a bar stool, legs crossed and face hopeful. Plump cheeks, lips like throttled . . . I let my face smile at her and order her a drink and make chitchat. She smiles sympathetically and asks me questions, trying to find out if I have—hey! She’s worried I might have a regular girlfriend, the stupid cunt, so I explain that no, my Elouise died in a car crash two years ago and I have been mourning since. She’s so stupid she laps it up, asks me lots of questions and sounds concerned. I figure I’ll drop her off with the rich guy’s pilot at Anse Marcel tomorrow: but first we’ll have some fun together. I act coy but let her draw me out because half the bitches want to be fucked hard by a stranger, they just have to convince themselves he’s sensitive and caring at first to get over their inhibitions. After a while she looks at me slack-mouthed like she’s already dripping, and I figure it’s time. So I ask if she wants to come back to my place and she accepts.
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