Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  There are other ways and many of them. You can use cyber-payments and trade in digital money. You can use no-limit value cards like Mondex and make telephone transfers to a trickle-down system. Money markets are open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, so the money never stops moving. You can use trust systems like Chop or Hawallah, when your receipt will be a torn playing card or a laundry ticket, and money never crosses a border or registers on an electronic system. You can use the futures market, buying and selling the same commodity under a broker’s anonymity, paying the commission, maybe even taking a small loss. You can buy antiques or jewellery. You can team up with someone who owns a casino, buy chips, play the tables, win a little, lose a little, then cash in.

  You can bring your money back through any one of a hundred offshore facilities whose owners are a mystery. There are Caribbean islands with a population of a few thousand and better than five hundred banks that are owned by the Nothing Corporation whose board members are John Doe, Mickey Blank and Jack Noname.

  Drugs aside, money laundering is the biggest illegal international business. The sums are astronomical: hundreds of billions of dollars, for sure. Ricardo just wanted a fraction of this. A fraction of a fraction. He’d worked hard to secure his minuscule corner of the market, and he was seriously unhappy about being muscled out, though he remembered Jonah nailed to his chair and accepted that London was a bust.

  He’d gone out to buy a newspaper, cigarettes, a lottery ticket. He took his usual read from the rack, then stopped short. There were a dozen or so different papers on display, and one of them carried a picture above the title advertising a feature article in that day’s issue: Delaney’s article on Stanley Bowman. It wasn’t a name Ricardo recognized, but he’d seen the face before. He’d seen it in a rear-view mirror.

  He opened the paper and started to read. As he read, he smiled.

  Toni was tired of hearing how lucky she’d been. She didn’t feel lucky; she felt unhappy and angry and sore. The boys had dropped her a block from the hospital and she had limped down to A & E, shouting with pain, her hand clutching her ass. By the time she got there, the left leg of her jeans was sopping.

  The boys had explained that it wouldn’t be wise for them to go with her (though of course they wanted to). There would be too many questions to answer (and they really didn’t have the answers). The police would be called, for sure (which might well prove embarrassing).

  So maybe she could say she was out for a walk when… Or was lying on the grass in the park when… Or she couldn’t remember quite what… Toni asked them exactly what it was that someone shot in the ass wouldn’t quite remember, but by this time they were dumping her on the pavement. On her ass on the pavement.

  It must have been because she’d been lying full length in the car that the bullet had gone through the fat of her backside, clipped the passenger seat and deflected into the dashboard. The boys looked at the hole in the dash and cursed. The boy in the passenger seat had wanted everyone to know that he’d come that close.

  That motherfucking close, dude.

  Toni had wailed, trying to look round at the damage, and her more-or-less boyfriend had told her, yeah, they’d get her somewhere first, go looking for the Toyota Team later. He’d made it sound like a concession.

  Now she was on her hands and knees, ass up, while a doctor stitched the exit wound, then applied a dressing as a cop, with a poor sense of timing, asked her questions. The cop was a woman who liked a joke, but she wasn’t ready to allow that Toni had been walking when she was shot, because the angle of the wound was wrong, or lying in the park, because the same applied, or that she was confused about the incident, because somehow that didn’t strike true.

  Toni decided to hold to the amnesia story. She’d heard about injury trauma, and it sounded like a good idea. She could shrug and shake her head and speak about walking and lying in the park as false memories.

  The cop was sceptical. Toni told the cop to kiss her ass.

  Gideon Woolf was dressing to go out, this time, in black. Silent Wolf wore black at night and became a shadow… no, less than a shadow. The long coat wasn’t right for climbing. Instead, he put on a roll-neck, a hooded top with zipper pockets, 501s, sneakers. The knife went into his waistband under the hoodie; the gun into one zipper pocket; into the other, a home-made grappler – a thin rope the end of which had been unravelled and self-lashed to a heavy glass paperweight.

  The sky was darkening by the minute, a heavy blue dusk. He felt good. He felt that necessary buzz along with a tightness in the throat, a tightness in the gut. His fingertips tingled. On TV there were scenes of conflict, then a politician invoking God, then men spilling from the back of a truck in windblown rain.

  A voice said, The infantry, going forward as one.

  Woolf experienced a sudden flashback to his waking dream.

  Men walking in single file, the road white, no sound… A flicker of light at the corner of his vision… Then a shot, a cry…

  Coward. You filthy fucking coward.

  It seems they are making love… pretty soon, he’ll forget about the conflict and chaos and fear. They lie together and talk. He answers all her questions.

  Dirty girl. Oh, you dirty bitch.

  The images staggered him, and he put out a hand, steadying himself against the door-jamb. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. Aimée’s face swam up behind his closed eyelids, her smile, her lips moving: I love you.

  What can I do? Aimée… what can I do now but kill you?

  He sat in his operator’s chair for a moment or two, breathing deeply, channelling his thoughts to the task in hand. Silent Wolf stalking the alleyways, moving unseen over rooftops. A street-glow from the Strip played on the ceiling, pink-and-green neon; car horns sounded; engines revved; voices shouted threats or invitations. He was ready. He left the scorched room, his step light as he went downstairs.

  On TV, the politician was still talking about God.

  69

  Stanley Bowman thought he had better things to do. There was money to be moved, some clean, some slightly soiled, some distinctly grimy. There was a deal to be closed, perfectly legit, and another where the names had been changed to protect the limitlessly guilty. There were several above-board companies to be looked after, some of which carried government contracts and could name Members of Parliament among their directors.

  A long time ago Bowman had learned that high-profile respectable businesses with high-profile respectable connections were great camouflage for certain less public activities. Working both sides of that divide took time, but it also brought rewards: the dirty work trebled your profits, the open-book businesses brought status and position – people wanted to write feature articles about you.

  He wasn’t happy about playing go-between, but the Americans had both influence and amazing connections. Their business was worldwide, highly profitable and wholly legitimate: a growth industry that showed no sign of falling off. It depended on war, and there were wars round the globe, wars 24/7, wars that had been going on for decades, wars that had only just begun, territorial wars, religious wars, racial wars, drug wars, doctrinal wars, wars that depended on old grudges, on new antagonisms, wars for political gain, wars for democracy, wars for domination, wars that were being fought out of habit, out of hatred, out of ignorance.

  Wars require weapons, and Bowman was very anxious for a piece of that particular action. It was in his interests to help crack a market where he could be broker. Like Bowman, Morgan had taken American money; he couldn’t expect simply to shrug and say, ‘I tried.’

  Bowman parked and walked past the Honda without really noticing it. When Morgan let him in, he noticed the glance that went over his shoulder and laughed.

  ‘Are they out there – your minders?’

  ‘I told you.’

  Bowman could hear yells and explosions from a farther room. Morgan had been watching TV. They went down a long hallway to the back of the house, and
Morgan poured drinks before bothering to switch off the movie.

  ‘Now,’ Bowman said, ‘we need some sort of a game plan. These people with influence… Who’s got secrets? Who’s in debt? Who’s ambitious?’ He smiled. ‘Who’s got something to lose?’

  Woolf looked ahead; he looked back down the street. People searching for a restaurant, people strolling. He walked past the house, to the end of the street, then started back. The restaurant door opened and closed; the strollers turned the corner. Woolf dropped down into the basement area of the house with scaffolding.

  There was an alarm warning clamped to one of the scaffolding poles. From his vantage point below, Woolf looked up and saw the passive infra-red detectors on the first level of the scaffolding. He went back to the street. A car went by, then a pizza-delivery bike, its wasp-whine fading. Woolf threw the grappler, lobbing it under-arm. The weight rose and arced perfectly, dropping over a pole on the third level. He fed the rope out until the weighted end came to hand, then tied a running knot and pulled on the rope again, sending it back.

  The next part was tricky: he had to clear the first level and the infra-red. He held the rope in his teeth and climbed on to the railings that bordered the basement area, his feet placed carefully between the spikes, then wound the rope round his right hand and launched himself, pulling hard and lifting his body in order to rise feet first, like a pole-vaulter. His heels smacked the scaffolding, then his back, leaving him breathless for a moment. He crooked his knees and got first his lower legs, then his thighs, on to a scaffolding plank and hauled himself upright.

  He climbed the poles to the top of the house, pulled aside the flap of a tarpaulin and stepped into the roof-space. From there he went down to the basement kitchen and from there into the walled garden. When he hoisted himself up, he could see Neil Morgan’s garden.

  Bowman was beginning to form the opinion that Morgan was a smart operator: smarter, anyway, than he’d seemed. What this guy wanted was more money. What made Bowman suspect that? Well, the fact that Morgan kept insisting that money had nothing to do with it, money didn’t come into it, money wasn’t the issue. He thought it might be time to make a call to the Americans to find out what they could offer to sweeten the pot.

  The bathroom was his excuse for getting time alone: no point in making a phone call with Morgan in the background trying to keep up the pretence that he’d done all he could no matter what the kick-back. You had to have the promise of cash on the table; you had to be able to say, ‘So how does a hundred-k sound?’

  But before the call, a little something, a lift, a treat. He used a shaving mirror to cut three lines and rolled a twenty-pound note. It was a good hit. He gave the first line time to soak in, then dipped his head for the next. He could hear that, downstairs, Morgan had switched the TV back on.

  Woolf had crossed the gardens that separated him from Morgan’s house and tried the basement door. If he was unlucky he could tap out a pane of glass and reach through to the key, or pop a window, or remove a door panel, but he hadn’t really expected to meet a problem. In the game, Silent Wolf moved swiftly and easily from place to place, frame to frame, moment to moment; it was how things worked.

  He’d tried the door and it was unlocked, of course. People like Morgan just didn’t feel that vulnerable.

  As he climbed the stairs from the basement, he could hear Morgan and Bowman talking. One of the men laughed. A door opened. Woolf saw Bowman going upstairs. It was a complication, and he knew he probably ought to regroup and rethink, but he also knew that Morgan’s wife would return, that the security would continue, that this might be his only chance.

  He moved quickly and quietly down the hallway to the room, taking out the gun, glancing towards the stairs in case the other man returned. The door was partly open, and Woolf could see Neil Morgan standing by the fireplace on the far side of the room and drinking whisky. When Woolf walked in holding the gun, Morgan was motionless for a moment, then he picked up a fire-iron and backed off.

  Woolf said, ‘You filthy coward.’

  He walked towards the man, the gun high and pointing at his face, though he had no intention of firing it. A shot would be heard and, in any case, he wanted to use the knife.

  Woolf said, ‘You! You filthy fucking coward.’

  Morgan gave a yell. His gaze was fixed on Woolf, but, at the same time, he was reaching blindly with his left hand, two fingers extended. Woolf looked for the panic alarm, its double red buttons, and spotted it mounted on the wall close to the door. He moved to herd his man away from it. Morgan yelled again, calling for help. Woolf rushed him, anticipating the swing of the fire-iron, left to right, and blocking it with his arm. He kicked on the turn, straight-legged, taking Morgan just below the sternum, and the man went down, dropping the fire-iron, retching air.

  Woolf yelled at him, ‘You coward! You! Filthy coward!’

  He picked up the iron and clipped Morgan on the side of the head: enough to pacify him. Morgan’s eyes clouded, but maybe he saw Woolf draw the knife, maybe he suddenly knew who this man was, because he found enough strength to get on to all fours and go hands-and-knees for the panic alarm. Woolf lifted the iron and hit him again, the blow sending the man forward. He found the buttons, fingers forked, and Woolf hit him a third time.

  That third blow wrecked something in Morgan: it broke a link somewhere deep in the man. He convulsed, gagging, his limbs flipping wildly. Woolf got behind him with the knife, wanting to steady his man for the cut, but it was impossible. Morgan was on the move, bucking and rolling. The blade cut his head, his arm, his shoulder.

  In his mind’s eye, Woolf saw one man walking downstairs, two more running across the road to the front door. He lashed out once more with the knife, cutting Morgan across the face, then ran.

  It wasn’t the TV Bowman heard, it was Morgan’s cries, Woolf’s shouts. The coke had sharpened him up, but also made him slightly detached. He’d snorted the third line, then made his call, getting the answer he’d hoped for, though not at first and not without difficulty.

  The American had said, ‘This guy already owes us. Tell him that.’

  ‘He needs a sweetener.’

  ‘He’s got expensive habits or what?’

  ‘It’s the way forward,’ Bowman had said. ‘I’m sure of it.’ He added, ‘You have to realize too that I’m putting in a lot of work here.’

  The American sighed. ‘Morgan’s not the only one in need of a sweetener.’

  ‘Time’s money,’ Bowman said. ‘I can only do so much on a limited budget.’

  ‘What are we talking here?’

  Bowman settled into a negotiation. It was what he did best. To some people, negotiating was a tiresome necessity: claims and counter-claims, white lies, chopped logic, ground gained and ground lost. Bowman knew it to be his true language, the language of his country, the language of his tribe.

  They’d agreed two sums, one for Morgan, one for Bowman. They had come with a threat on the side.

  Woolf was at the end of the hall and starting down to the basement when Bowman walked downstairs to make his offer, smiling a cool coke smile and not noticing the sudden silence. He’d had just enough time to get into the room and be standing over Morgan’s body when the Honda men came through the door.

  Morgan’s convulsions had dwindled to a series of shudders and tremors. He lay splashing in his own blood like a landed fish. Then he lay still.

  70

  It was late by the time Stella and Harriman sat down with Bowman. He said, ‘It was a business meeting. I went upstairs. When I came down –’ He spread his hands expressively.

  Stella said, ‘You didn’t see anyone? Hear anyone?’

  ‘No, but there must have been someone…’

  ‘There was no sign of forced entry,’ Stella observed, ‘though forensics are still at the house.’

  ‘Why would I kill him?’ Bowman asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m asking questions,’ Stella told him, ‘that’s all. You were at
the scene when his security officers came in. You’re all we’ve got. You can wait until your solicitor arrives – do you want to do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bowman said. Then, ‘No, no, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What kind of business?’ Harriman asked.

  ‘Business advice.’ Bowman was busking.

  ‘What kind of business advice?’

  ‘Money matters.’

  ‘Keep going,’ Stella said.

  ‘Where best to invest it.’ Speaking softly, slowly, the mild Scottish accent soothing the vowel sounds.

  Stella raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re not a broker, are you?’

  ‘I can be if the occasion demands.’ Bowman passed a hand over his face; he might have been distressed, Stella thought, or irritated. He said, ‘There are people who know me. People who will vouch for me.’

  ‘Will they vouch for your cocaine habit?’ Harriman asked.

  ‘You want to talk about that?’ Bowman laughed. ‘A man’s been murdered.’

  ‘No,’ Stella said, ‘he’s not dead.’

  ‘Oh…’ Bowman almost shrugged. ‘Oh, well, that’s good.’

  ‘He’s unconscious. He might die yet.’

  ‘Ah…’ As if he’d forgotten he’d mentioned it, Bowman said, ‘People who know who I am. Who know I wouldn’t –’

  Harriman said, ‘We know who you are.’

  Bowman nodded. He said, ‘Good. Okay, then…’ No one spoke for a moment, so he said it again: ‘That’s good.’