Fascinated

by Fascinated (retail) (epub)

  The gardens of Golden Square are deserted but for a solitary shadow stalking through the shrubbery. The shadow calls out to them and reaches out a hand clutching an empty alms-dish in the shape of a waxed paper cup. Webster ignores it. Frank pokes in his pockets and throws a cascade of coins on the ground.

  Emerging from Lower James Street they walk briskly through the narrow corridor of Sherwood Street, where a few old drinkers have already settled down for the night pressed against the warmth of the ventilation shafts set in the buttresses of the Regent Palace Hotel; and turning at Dunkin’ Donuts, on the corner of Glasshouse Street, they are swept into Piccadilly Circus on a rushing tide of noise and lights.

  Here, beneath the neon scaffolds the pavements are crowded with people laughing and eating, smoking and spitting, swearing and calling to one another; swilling from every direction swarming from the steps of the Underground, dashed against railings and floodlit doorways, spilling over the glittering streets and pushed into frightened, trampling herds by the sudden jolting of heavy traffic.

  Here are shop girls and filing clerks, secretaries and paper shufflers, surging forward to Leicester Square, already late for the last performance. Here are car thieves and card sharks, Jack the Lad and Jack of Diamonds, trawling the night for the smell of excitement. Here are wives of the senior board, hunchbacked by furs and diamond earrings, come to fork prawns at the Cafe Royal. Here are fat corporation men, seized by satyriasis, dreaming of mixing business with pleasure. Here are crocodiles of salesmen wearing identical travel suits with paper badges pinned to their collars: Fullers’ Link Chain & Gate Convention – please return to the London Hilton. Here are the lost and found, the blessed and the damned. Here are hawkers of dogmeat burgers, candyfloss and coloured sherbets, postcards and tinsel souvenirs. Here are tarts touting, dippers drifting, toners picking the waste bins and gutters, and gangs of swaggering hobbledehoys everywhere saluting the night with cans of Carlsberg, smack, crack and poppers.

  The multitude swarms and surges, pulling Frank and Webster forward, lifting them from their feet, bearing them aloft and throwing them down again like casks on a storming ocean until, when all direction seems lost, they are slung from the rim of the vortex into Shaftesbury Avenue where they hurry, impatient and angry, to the gates of Chinatown.

  The night is scented at last with star anise and coriander. The pavements are piled with baskets of fruit and dried fish, gourds, cabbage and salted eggs. Shop windows are filled with curious trinkets, books in impossible languages, charts of traditional acupuncture. The five elements and their seasons. The officials aligned for cosmic balance. Frank’s spirits lift again, bewitched by the sudden shift in surroundings, until they reach the Nan Cheng, set in a gloomy terrace along a cobbled back street.

  ‘It’s a modest enough arrangement,’ admits Webster, surveying the scuffed red paintwork and panes of dirty glass. A faded menu, mounted in a bamboo frame, hangs from greasy cords in the window. ‘They save their energy for the food. It was voted Triad canteen of the year.’ Nothing can smother his bright, good humour. He’s here to celebrate and nothing is going to stop him.

  A young Chinese waiter approaches them as they push through the door and leads them to a table against one wall. The table is laid with red paper napkins, a bottle of soy sauce and a glass egg cup filled with toothpicks. The restaurant is empty. Tonight the Triads must be eating French or Italian. Elaborate silk and lacquer lanterns, hoary with dust, hang from a tongue-and-groove ceiling. Posters on the walls provide a series of sentimental views of mountains and pagodas. A beaded glass curtain conceals a passage that leads to the lavatories and kitchen.

  ‘You want a drink?’ the waiter asks them as they settle themselves on the narrow chairs. He’s wearing a green shirt with black polyester trousers, cut very low at the hips and polished at the pockets and seams. His broad face holds an expression of vague but universal contempt.

  ‘Two beers,’ says Frank.

  ‘And tea,’ says Webster. ‘China tea.’

  ‘Two tea,’ says the waiter, snapping open a notebook and scratching an entry with a ballpoint pen.

  ‘China tea,’ confirms Webster.

  ‘And two beers,’ says Frank.

  The waiter presents them with menu cards and disappears through the beaded curtain.

  ‘You’ve got to stop thinking about Valentine,’ says Webster gently, while they meditate on the merits of sweet and sour quick supper special. He glances at Frank across the top of his menu.

  ‘Is it so obvious?’

  ‘Yes. Think about stuffed squid and spicy noodles.’

  Frank drops his card and rattles the toothpicks in the egg cup. ‘If I hadn’t made such a fool of myself we wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe I’ll have the bean curd and pickles. Do you want to share some rainbow rolls or shall we have the pork pancakes?’

  ‘Pork pancakes,’ says Webster, beaming. ‘She’s a lovely girl, Frank. Vain. Stubborn. Cantankerous. Selfish. Just the way I like ’em. I’m surprised I’m not in love with her myself.’

  ‘I thought you were.’

  ‘Let’s wait until we’re a thousand miles from here before we start feeling homesick,’ says Webster, pulling open his paper napkin and trying to stuff his collar.

  ‘You ready?’ asks the waiter, returning with their drinks.

  Frank runs his finger down the menu. ‘We’ll have seventeen. Twenty-one. Thirty. Thirty-three and a small forty-nine.’

  ‘No thirty-three.’

  ‘Twelve?’ suggests Webster.

  ‘No twelve,’ says the waiter.

  ‘Twenty-seven?’

  The waiter looks puzzled. ‘You want twenty-seven and twenty-one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The waiter pauses, waiting for them to change their minds, and when it’s obvious they’re too proud to admit their mistake he gathers up the menu cards and strolls away to share the joke with the kitchen.

  The food, when it arrives, is hot and delicious. Stir-fried squid and red peppers. Fat slices of omelette stuffed with pork and shrimp. Steamed fish. Deep bowls of spicy noodles.

  ‘I should have been stronger,’ says Frank, dipping into a bowl of pickles. ‘I should have stopped her from going home. How is she going to handle Conrad?’

  ‘It makes it easier,’ says Webster. ‘He doesn’t care about you and me. He just wants to keep a hold on his daughter.’

  ‘But she can’t stay with him in that house. It’s monstrous!’

  ‘Give it time,’ says Webster. ‘Give it a couple of months in the sun while the old devil calms down and comes to his senses. It can’t last. Valentine knows how to deal with him.’

  ‘What happens if something goes wrong?’ says Frank.

  But Webster isn’t listening. He’s staring at the door to the street, his chopsticks dangling in his fingers, a noodle slithering from his mouth and falling against his sleeve.

  An elderly man, supported by two large bodyguards, enters the restaurant and shuffles painfully to their table. He’s wearing yellow kid gloves and an overcoat with an astrakhan collar. The men who flank him are built like blacksmiths dressed in voluminous raincoats.

  ‘Most rewarding!’ says Talbot, directing himself at Webster. ‘I was rather afraid we had missed you!’ He allows himself a cadaverous smile and looks around at the empty tables.

  Webster leans back in his chair and stares at his aged adversary, considers the size of his bodyguards, measures the room from the ceiling to floor, counts the bowls of food on that table. ‘How did you know we were here?’ he asks, clacking his chopsticks together.

  ‘Johnny Mango saw you in Brewer Street,’ says Talbot. ‘A man visits Soho at night to indulge his earthly appetites. You blunt your own carnality by irritating your gastric juices. Foo Yung. Hot Yang Chow. Diabolical mistresses. I checked the Tang Chun and the Nan Hai and here you are in the old Nan Cheng. You’re getting careless. I’m disappointed. A few brief years ago you wouldn’t have made such a mundane mistake.’r />
  ‘I see you’ve found some new bruisers,’ says Frank. He turns his head slowly to stare at Talbot, his heart pounding, his hands smoothing the tablecloth, clutching the coarse edge of wood beneath it, ready to overturn the tables and go into battle with a restaurant chair at the slightest indication from Webster.

  ‘Shut your mouth when Mr Talbot is talking!’ shouts the right flank, whistling through a broken nose. He’s a ponderous brute of a man with his raincoat buttoned as far as his chin.

  ‘And put your hands on the table where we can see to break them,’ adds the left flank, scowling, riding up and down on the balls of his feet. He’s taller than his companion, with a blue tattoo on his thick white neck and the face of a large bull terrier.

  Talbot looks at Frank and shakes his head. ‘It’s time you went home, my young friend. I’ve no immediate quarrel with you.’

  Frank looks past Talbot, across the restaurant, towards the freedom of the street, where a man has paused to read the menu hung in the window. The man, remote as a shadow, has a green and red sports bag under his arm. He leans forward against the window, shielding his eyes against the reflections in the glass, peering briefly into the restaurant.

  ‘You’re wrong, Talbot. I was at the Golden Goose. I helped to put down the Cockers.’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ says Webster. ‘He wouldn’t hit a fly with his handbag.’

  ‘We’re in this together,’ says Frank fiercely. He’s tired of being bullied and taunted. After all the preparations they’ve made to smuggle themselves from the country, he’ll be damned if he’ll surrender Webster to this decrepit gangster. Nothing is going to stop them walking out of here. ‘If you’re picking a fight with him,’ he warns Talbot, ‘you’re picking a fight with me.’

  ‘That casts a darker complexion over the proceedings,’ says Talbot, frowning. He ruminates upon the confession as he taps his shrivelled fingers lightly against his chin.

  Frank feels the world slowing down around him. Everywhere he casts his eye objects are revealed with a new and astonishing clarity. The grains of rice still glued to the tips of his chopsticks, the blisters in the glaze of the blue and white bowls, the pattern in the weave of the table linen, like rows of chicken claw prints, the sparkling ripples of the beaded curtain as the waiter approaches them.

  ‘You want a drink?’ demands the waiter, directing the party to a neighbouring table.

  ‘Shut your mouth when Mr Talbot is talking!’ shouts the right flank, taunted beyond endurance. He lashes out with an arm and catches the waiter full in the chest, knocking him to the floor.

  ‘Sodding Chink!’ growls the bodyguard, checking his raincoat sleeve. ‘He nearly made me lose a button.’

  ‘Kick his bollocks – learn him a lesson,’ says the left flank with a lop-sided grin.

  ‘You kick him!’ says the right flank indignantly. ‘I’m wearing new shoes.’

  The waiter springs back to life, cursing, yelling towards the kitchen for help, his face alight like a jack-o’-lantern.

  Webster starts to rise from his chair, catching a bowl with his thumb and making it catapult from the table.

  Frank grabs the table, tilting it forward, knocking down glasses and bottles, splashing the beer and soy sauce, scattering rice and noodles and toothpicks.

  A large Chinese cook pushes through the curtain. He’s wearing nothing but canvas shorts and waving a meat axe in his fist. His face and shoulders are glazed with sweat. A blue dragon uncoils from the pit of his stomach and swells against his chest. A fabulous serpent with hooked wings and devils’ claws. Its eyes are giant pearls. Flames feather from its open jaws.

  ‘Freeze!’ shouts the left flank nervously. He flicks open his raincoat and whips out a steel Colt Combat Commander from a leather horizontal shoulder rig.

  Frank and Webster slowly subside into the wreckage of their table. The waiter falls to his knees and presses the palms of his hands to his skull. The cook drops the meat axe and lifts his arms in the air, stretching his loose and bulging stomach. The dragon twists on its flexing wings. The meat axe clatters to the floor.

  The right flank unbuttons his raincoat and pulls out a small-frame Chiefs Special snubby, thrusting it hard into Frank’s face while the left flank, whistling with excitement, waves the big Colt at Webster’s throat.

  Talbot smiles and takes a moment to gloat upon his victims’ faces, the way they close their eyes against death, the way they gulp at the air as if drowning, terror flooding their arteries and pouring its poison into their hearts. It’s a deeply disgusting spectacle.

  ‘Goodnight! Goodbye! Farewell! Adieu! You must excuse me if I step outside but I really can’t afford to splash this coat and I’ve never liked the look of brains.’

  He turns and shuffles away from the sight of his vanquished enemies, huddled still at their table, trapped between the wall and their silent executioners. He reaches for the restaurant door and the cold clean air of the street. How he hates the smell of Chinese food! How he loathes the sight of blood!

  Frank retreats, shrinking into the shell of his body, pulling into his own darkness, searching for Valentine, wanting the memory of her face as a talisman to protect him. It can’t end here, without warning, cut down by a rented firing squad over a supper of pork and shrimp omelette, with no time for counsel or confession, chanting the thousand names of God, pleading for time, begging for mercy, hoping for angels to sweep down and save them, brushing death away with their arms.

  The window falls like a sheet of ice and a thunderbolt fills the restaurant with a whirling, incandescent wind that lifts the furniture to the ceiling and makes the lanterns explode into cascading blossoms of light. The tables spin and carelessly throw out their skirts. The chairs roll and tumble, one upon another, as nimble as circus acrobats.

  The killers bend like burning trees. Their raincoats spout flames. Their melting shoes take root in the floor as the wind divides into a thousand flying knives.

  Frank is thrown back, his face scorched and his ears filled with boiling wax. A splintering table swoops down on him, the long legs striking the wall like spears.

  A yellow kid glove, still filled by the weight of its owner’s hand, yet separated from its owner’s wrist by a distance greater than the span of an arm, slaps the blistering tabletop with an angry gesture of defiance.

  Frank is drenched with blood, grains of hot glass and soft plums of viscera. The air burns black as it turns to smoke. And then there is nothing but silence.

  Kadinsky stands in the street and stares through the smoke into the ruins of the Nan Cheng. All around him men are shouting, women are screaming, dogs are barking, alarm bells are ringing, rattled by the shock of the big grenade. Faces appear at shattered windows. A crowd gathers at the top of the street and fingers are pointed in his direction. But Kadinsky stands his ground, smiling and unblinking, staring into the flames of hell, searching for signs of lingering life. A burning windmill of arms. The spillings of a disembowelled waiter. The fire shines on his face and turns his eyes into rubies. The smoke fills his nostrils with the stench of urine and scorched hair, melting plastic and hot blood.

  At last he packs the grenade launcher into the green and red sports-bag and tosses it into the flames. The target has been destroyed. No signs of hostile activity. It’s time to return to base and sink a few cold beers. He’ll push through the gawping crowd, escape this maze of backstreets and reach the shelter of the Underground. He’ll go back to the house and claim Valentine as the spoils of war. She’s the only one left alive who can link him with these killings. Scrubber Ronnie is buried beneath a box of Tormentor ticklers with his throat slashed from ear to ear. Old Picasso tried to struggle and had to be kicked to death. He’ll drown Valentine in the shower, softly and slowly, feeling her sinking under his fingers, washing away her perfume and spices, before he takes his final pleasure. He’ll carry her to bed and bury his face long and deep in the marvellous odours of her failing body. Tomorrow he’ll have lu
nch in Paris and take a night flight to Africa.

  The crowd grows bolder, shuffling forward to gain a better view of the slaughter. But as Kadinsky turns to retreat, something catches his attention. It’s a movement of muscle and bone, a head still connected to a collar, something crawling on its hand and knees from beneath a blazing tabletop. Impossible! The sky fallen and the dead risen. The figure crawls away through the rubble and another corpse stirs into life and gropes towards the back of the restaurant.

  Kadinsky curses, plunges into the heat of the fire, pushing towards the darkness of the passage that leads to the lavatories and kitchen. When he reaches the top of the kitchen stairs he pauses, sheltering against the wall, to pull a Glock 23 automatic from the lining of his jacket.

  He knows from bitter experience that some men prove difficult to destroy. They survive grenade and rocket attack, buried in mud, cushioned by corpses, and emerge from battle with nothing but bruises. They walk away from shotgun blasts, bend the blades of bayonets and catch pistol bullets with their teeth. Bad luck to fight beside such men. Dangerous to keep their company. They draw death away from themselves and onto the heads of their companions.

  He rams a magazine of soft lead hollowpoints into the grip of the Glock and checks his pockets for spare ammunition. Two full magazines. The first packed with Hydra-Shok and the second filled with heavy grain Pro Load. Satisfied with his fire-power he creeps down the narrow flight of stairs and into the restaurant kitchen.

  The kitchen covers a large basement with walls of white ceramic bricks. The floor beneath his boots is puddled with oil and wet scraps of food. The smoke extractor in the ceiling vibrates and thunders, shaking the pots and pans on their shelves and rocking a basket of fish perched on the edge of a torn zinc counter. A rice pan boils on a range of gas burners. The ovens are hot. The door to the cold store is hanging open. There! Mark it. Hit hard and take cover.