The Break

by Ronnie O'Sullivan

  ‘Yeah, now that’s what I’m talking about. That’s the kind of reaction I want to see on someone’s face when they walk into here,’ Tommy said, grinning over at Frankie from where he was sitting in a raised-up bubbling jacuzzi, with Chenguang in a purple bikini on his left and a similarly attired buxom young blonde lady on his right.

  ‘Not bad,’ Frankie said, looking round. ‘Not bad at all. Well classy, in fact.’

  And it was. Even with all the dust sheets and half-plastered walls. A six foot deep, fifteen metre long hole had been carved out into the ground. What would end up being a pool, no doubt. Corinthian columns had already been set into place at metre-wide intervals around its perimeter.

  ‘Like the last days of Rome, eh?’ said Tommy, getting out of the jacuzzi and pulling on a purple robe. ‘Only this here’s London and it’s only the start.’

  Frankie noticed Whitney, the Doberman, sitting over by the back wall, where a grey-haired bloke in overalls was working on a decorative alcove set into the plasterwork there. The source of that tap-tap-tapping noise.

  ‘That’s Matteo, that is. A proper Italian artisan. Used to work in’ – Tommy mimed inverted commas with his fingers – ‘professional artistic reproduction.’

  A forger, in other words.

  ‘Yeah, there’s nothing that’s ever been made that he can’t reproduce.’

  Frankie noticed something white around Whitney’s hind legs.

  ‘Is she,’ he said out loud, before he could stop himself, ‘wearing a nappy?’

  ‘Who, Whitney? Oh yeah. Pampers. She’s on her period, isn’t she?’ said Tommy. ‘She’s being a right grumpy cow.’ Tommy sat down at a table with a coffee pot already laid out steaming on it, alongside a plate of fresh croissants. He pointed Frankie to a chair. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘quickly fill me in on how the whole tournament’s going then. Tam here recorded your little spot on the telly for me. Well stepped up, son. Well done. That took proper bollocks, that did. Good lad.’

  Tam glowered at Frankie, clearly irritated by the praise he was getting. But Frankie didn’t give a toss about that. He sat down and helped himself to coffee and shoved down one of the croissants too. Him and Riley talked for half an hour, with Frankie bringing him right up to date on everything, how happy the sponsors were, as well as the fans. Frankie talked Tommy through how much money he reckoned they’d probably made an’ all, and what promises they’d had from their business partners regarding further collaborations next year.

  ‘So the long and the short of it, then, is it’s a goer,’ Tommy concluded when Frankie was finally done. ‘And there’s nothing else I need to know?’

  ‘Yeah, Tommy,’ said Frankie, hating him all over again for the fact he’d fucked it when he hadn’t needed to. ‘And, no, there’s not.’

  For a couple of seconds, Tommy just watched him, and it even crossed Frankie’s mind that he might be about to call the whole fix off, but then he waved Tam over.

  ‘Right, time to get moving then,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the builders prepping in here for laying the pool’s foundations next week,’ he explained to Frankie. ‘But meanwhile you two lads better get back to the Ambassador, to make sure everything there’s still going according to plan.’

  *

  And there’s nothing else I need to know? Frankie got back to the Ambassador Club at just gone nine, feeling sick, with Tommy’s words still ringing in his head.

  Instead of going straight into the club, he headed straight upstairs instead. He was sweating like a pig again, and again not just from the weather. He stuck on his stereo loud, just wanting to lose himself, but hardly had the energy to strip off his clothes and get into the shower. He suddenly wished he’d never done it, this whole sodding tournament. Everything he’d said to Tommy, about how well it had all been going, none of it, none of it, might mean a thing after tomorrow night.

  He pictured the Old Man, there in Brixton nick. But not in the Visitors’ Room, not where he always met him, but instead in his cell. Only then it wasn’t his dad’s face he was looking at, at all. It was his. Because what if he got caught? What if Bram’s plan went wrong? He’d been so busy worrying about getting tripped up by Tommy, or ending up in Dougie’s friggin’ basement, that he’d shoved all this to the back of his mind. About how he was going to be doing a heist. A heist, for God’s sake. One that might leave him inside for the rest of his life.

  And suddenly he felt like the walls of the shower cubicle were closing in on him and he bit down so hard on his knuckles to stop himself from shouting out and getting heard by Xandra and Maxine in the room next door that he ended up watching blood run down his forearm and spiral down the drain. ‘Depeche Mode,’ the radio DJ said as he lurched back through to his room. ‘“Barrel of a Gun.”’ Yeah, that couldn’t have been more apt if it had tried.

  By the time he’d got dressed again, Xandra and Maxine had already left the flat to help get the club ready downstairs for today’s two semi-finals, which were due to kick off simultaneously on tables one and two at ten, before tonight’s final began at six. They’d left the radio on. That ‘Candle in the Wind’, by Elton John, was playing again. Written for Marilyn Monroe, according to Xandra, it had now been adopted by a grieving country for its dead Princess.

  Frankie took the first diazepam with water right here in the flat, sipping it like vodka. He did the second in the alley round the back of the club ten minutes later with an actual bottle of vodka, guzzling it down like water and nearly chucking it right back up straight away. But he didn’t. He kept it together. Then breath mints. More coffee. A walk around the block. Until . . . sliiiiiide . . . oh yeah, he felt it kicking in good.

  And that’s how the last day of the inaugural Soho Open went for Frankie James . . . the same as how it had started . . . in a bubble . . . in a blur . . . if anyone noticed, he didn’t know . . . didn’t care . . . didn’t give a shit about anything much, truth be told . . . not about what went down in the semi-finals . . . though, yeah, he’d be lying if he said it didn’t make him smile . . . O’Hanagan and Riley’s boys, Stephen Maxwell and Huw Watkins, both losing and losing big time like that . . . one of them to Adam Adamson and the other to a lower ranked player called Bo Wang . . . and without Tam Jackson and his boys even being in the building to do anything about it . . . and he didn’t give a shit either about the fury in O’Hanagan’s eyes as he was forced to watch . . . and he didn’t give a shit about the final either . . . or the permagrin on Riley’s face as he turned up and saw neither of his boys was even playing . . . or about how he then ended up staying and watching all the same in between Chenguang and his mum . . . or about how good a match everyone said it was . . . or about Tommy’s little speech which he still did at the end . . . or him cutting his ribbon and handing over the keys of the Beamer he’d put up as a prize to Adam Adamson . . . or about the congratulations Frankie got himself after that . . . from The Topster, Kind Regards, Jack, Tiffany, JoJo, Listerman, Riley, Chenguang, Grew, Jesús, Slim, Xandra, Maxine, Ash Crowther, Sea Breeze, Darren, even Tam . . . or the look Tommy gave him as he left the building, the look that told him in no uncertain terms that he’d be seeing him soon . . . no, Frankie didn’t give a shit about any of that either when it was happening, or afterwards . . . when all of it, all of it, sank into a blur . . .

  15

  Other than that Faithless tune, ‘Insomnia’, still going round and round and round his head, the only proof Frankie James had that he’d been in the Atlantic Bar the night before, completely off his chops, was that when he woke up and stumbled through to the kitchen of his flat at just gone four on Monday afternoon, there was a nice little card there from Xandra and Maxine, telling him thanks for all the rounds he’d brought them there and that they hoped by the time he woke up he’d have slept it all off OK, as well as thanking him once again for putting them up in the hotel for their treat, and letting him know they’d be back to help with the monster tidy up downstairs tomorrow afternoon.

  Another messag
e was waiting for Frankie on the Nokia phone Little Terry had given him. It told him where to meet Bram, Rivet and Lola. It told him when.

  *

  Really? Like, seriously? Honestly? Are you having a fucking giraffe?

  But Bram wasn’t joking. No wide smile split that great scarred melon of a head of his. Meaning he must be dead serious. Or as dead serious as a seven-foot geezer wearing nicked Thames Water overalls, bright-yellow waders and a Second World War gas mask slung around his tree trunk of a neck ever could be.

  The four of them – Frankie, Bram, Lola and Rivet – were hunched up in the confines of that single-storey maintenance building at the end of the alley at the back of the Ambassador Club. They’d pulled up outside it two minutes ago, at just gone midnight, in a white Transit with fake plates and a just as fake ‘Thames Water’ stencil plastered down its side. Rivet had backed them right up against the maintenance building’s door. A quick look round to check that no one was snooping, and out they’d all bundled, with Rivet working the maintenance building’s lock in three seconds flat.

  Inside it was windowless and stank of damp. The bright LED head torches the others were already wearing clicked on one by one, showing flickering glimpses of the little room they now found themselves inside, as well as the gas mask that Bram had just stuffed into Frankie’s already gloved hands.

  ‘But these things are never going to work,’ Frankie said, staring down at it. ‘They must be about a million years old.’

  ‘Second World War, actually,’ Rivet said.

  ‘Yeah, I was being sarcastic,’ Frankie hissed. ‘You should look it up in the dictionary. You’ll find it between . . . crazy . . . and . . . er . . .’ Shit, what else did you find it between? Bastards? Lunatics? Psychopaths? Grrrr. What other word for nutter was there that came after ‘S’?

  ‘Wing nut?’ Lola suggested.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. Wing nut.’ Beaten in an English vocabulary test by a professional criminal ex-heroin addict from Amsterdam . . . it hardly boded well for Frankie’s chances of success for the rest of tonight.

  She smiled at him, pleased with herself, but waveringly so, maybe because the penny had just dropped for her too that what they were planning – or rather what Bram was planning – was liable to get them all captured or killed, or quite possibly both.

  Bram signed something to Rivet.

  ‘He says they have newly fitted charcoal filters in them, leaving them perfectly sufficient for our purposes.’

  ‘Yeah, well they’d bloody better. Because you know what? Since coming into contact with Dougie Hamilton and you lot, I’ve imagined my demise occurring in a number of scenarios – but never once through being overpowered by the stench of pure shit while dressed in something that might last have been sported by Dame Vera friggin’ Lynn.’

  ‘OK, but no need to be so grumpy about it,’ Lola complained.

  But Frankie was grumpy. In spite of almost a whole bloody box of paracetamol, his head was still pounding from his excesses of last night. He was not in a good mood. Vodka? Had it been vodka he’d stuck on after leaving the club? He could still taste something worse. Maybe tequila. Maybe vomit too.

  He couldn’t remember anything after doing the last of those pills and that vodka in the alley . . . just glimpses, blurs. Christ, he couldn’t even remember for certain who’d bloody won. Had he made a dick of himself? Been hammered while he’d still been in the Ambassador? Who knew? Only time, he guessed, would tell.

  He pulled on the head torch he’d been issued with in the back of the van, clicked the switch and shone its beam over the locked sewer access door set into the building’s mildewed back wall.

  He shivered at the thought of what lay in wait beyond. Couldn’t help himself. He hated confined spaces. Got well claustrophobic. It was bad enough in here already. He shone his torch around. It couldn’t have been more than ten by ten. And horrible with it. A little table, two chairs. A funny-looking little phone. A little washbasin. Little hooks with helmets on the wall. Little signs telling you don’t do this and do do that. It was like a goddamn freakin’ clubhouse for moles. Even though they were still up on street level, they could have been miles underground.

  ‘Two minutes,’ Rivet said, taking a metal T-bar off a rack on the wall.

  Frankie could almost hear the seconds ticking down in his head. Timing. Hell, yeah. That’s what this was all about. They’d gone through it all after The Saint had come to get him and taken him back over to the riverside pad. Not just once, but ten times. Old Bram here had a schedule and reckoned that, so long as they kept to it exactly, it would get them all in and out of the Royal Academy alive and in one piece.

  ‘Ala-fucking-kazam,’ Rivet said, turning the T-bar in the outsized keyhole in the centre of the access door, its click echoing round the room.

  Abracadabra. Alakazam. The perfect Houdini move. Was that really what this was all about for these bastards? Some kind of a game? It certainly looked that way to Frankie, the way they were smiling, the glint in their eyes. They looked more like pill heads reaching the front of a club queue. Mad for it, they were. Either that, or just plain mad.

  ‘Spoo-ky,’ Rivet hissed, peering down into the dark, as he pulled the T-bar out of the keyhole again.

  He sniggered so hard that Frankie thought he might actually have meant the pun. It was shit enough for even Tommy Riley to appreciate. Shit being the operative word here, of course, as the reek of London’s bowels began guffing up at them from the hideous Victorian netherworld lying in wait for them beneath.

  Frankie finished heaving himself into his waders and pulled his backpack on. Inside was a bunch of stuff he’d be needing in a bit. Cloths to wrap the artworks in . . . the ones he’d been busily memorizing for the last two hours. And what else? Oh, yeah, clean gloves for wearing inside, so he didn’t damage the merch. And a balaclava just in case, even though Bram said the CCTV should go down with the rest of the alarm system. Should. Yeah, Frankie remembered the way Rivet had said it. And, last but not least, a brand-new pair of British Knights trainers – British Knights! the cheapskates! – for wearing once they hit the RA, because right up there at the top of Bram’s Happy Heist Hitlist was that they’d be leaving no poopy prints for the rozzers to follow back down into the sewers.

  ‘One minute,’ Rivet said, checking his watch.

  ‘Can you just stop that?’ Frankie said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The time thing. The countdown. I mean, apart from it being deeply fucking irritating, and if anything adding to the bloody stress of all this, it doesn’t even make sense.’

  Rivet looked offended. ‘How so?’

  ‘How in that when you get to zero in around thirty seconds time, it’s not really zero at all, is it? Not as far as the – I don’t know, wider mission – is concerned. It’s just zero for this little bit of it and then you’re going to have to start the countdown all over again for the rest of what we’ve got to do.’

  ‘He’s got a point,’ said Lola.

  Rivet folded his sinewy arms across his chest. ‘No, he does not. I’m partitioning.’

  ‘Partitioning?’ both Frankie and Lola said at once.

  ‘Precisely. I’m dividing the wider mission into bite-sized, manageable pieces, each of which I’ve assigned an individual countdown to keep us all on track.’

  Frankie turned round to face Bram. ‘And you agree with this, right?’

  ‘Agree with it? It was his idea,’ Rivet said.

  Bram nodded.

  ‘Come on, Frankie.’ Rivet patted him on the back. ‘Just trust in the plan.’

  Trust in the plan . . . trust in the plan . . . Frankie peered past Rivet into the gaping hole the other side of the sewer access door. The rusted hoops of the top of a ladder showed against a backdrop of dirty, damp red brick. Yeah, Frankie would trust in the plan all right, if only because it sure as hell didn’t look like it was God’s jurisdiction down there.

  ‘Oh, and Frankie. Keep a hold of th
is key, would ya?’ Rivet said. ‘We’ll be needing it to get up out of that manhole the other side.’

  Frankie took it, stuffed it into his pack. Bram groaned as he scraped the top of his head on the ceiling and his torch beam swung around maddeningly for a second or two. It didn’t exactly add to the overall ambience of the place. More like reminded Frankie of that crazy old show, The Prisoner. In fact, maybe that’s what all this was. Some kind of drug-induced fantasy? An after-effect of the diazepam? Or maybe it was even still last summer and he was off his head in Ibiza with Jesús, Balearic Bob and Grew – and everything that he thought had happened since had been nothing but a dream? Jesus – real Jesus, this time – he’d give both his left and his right nut for that.

  ‘OK, muchachos, let’s go,’ Rivet said. Then through the hole he went.

  ‘And you are really, really sure about all this?’ Frankie checked one final time, turning to Bram, kind of hoping that a reason might have just this very second occurred to him to call the whole thing off.

  But no such luck. He was grinning again. Madly? Or out of confidence? Or perhaps he just got off on this. Like that Hannibal in The A-Team. Maybe Bram just loved seeing a plan come together and really could be trusted after all.

  ‘You next,’ said Lola.

  Oh, great. So now he was second in line. What was it they always called the poor bastards at the front of the column in those Vietnam movies? The ones who always ended up treading on a mine, or getting machine-gunned or machete’d in half? On ‘Point’. Yeah, just brilliant. What a fucking honour. Not.

  He turned to tell her as much and to suggest that he bring up the rear, but she simply screwed up her face and quickly waved him on.

  ‘Just get going and quit shining that torch in my eyes,’ she said. ‘From here on in, we’re going to need all the night sight we can get.’

  Ah, screw it. At least going up front with Rivet meant he’d get this journey over with first. Frankie turned his back on her and stepped through the doorway and stared down the vertical shaft that Rivet had descended into. But, God, the stink, the stink. Whatever you do, don’t breathe through your nose.