by C B Wilson
Even though Holmes was doing the talking, Gingerman was addressing most of his conversation to Ellie’s chest, until Holmes said, “I’m the one who’s talking to you Mr Gingerman, so if you could stop talking to her breasts, I’d appreciate it.”
A noise somewhere between a squeal and a high-pitched laugh came out of Gingerman. He slapped Holmes on the shoulder. “I know where you’re coming from. Man got a beautiful lady like this one, he got to watch out.”
Holmes said, “I tell you what. Take us out to the yacht, and if you bring us back in one piece, she’s all yours.”
Gingerman laughed again as though Holmes was the funniest guy he’d ever met. “She looks like a handful.”
Holmes said, “You don’t know the half of it.”
Ellie said, “I beg your pardon…”
Holmes put his arm around her. “It’s alright, darling. Mr Gingerman and I are just joking.”
“Very funny,” she said, but she didn’t relax her body until Holmes got the message and let go of her shoulders.
They followed Gingerman to the dock. He was wearing nothing but long grey shorts that were ripped and cut to pieces. His outfit was topped off with some ratty dreads, and a silver necklace rocked between his moobs. He kept stroking his surprisingly neatly trimmed beard that didn’t show much ginger at all. He didn’t have the gnarled, weathered look of a fisherman. He was too fleshy and smooth-skinned for a man who did manual labour out at sea, but he did have a boat.
It was painted to look from a distance like the fishing boats from the harbour, but up close, it was obvious that Gingerman had nothing to do with fishing. The craft was low and sleek and powered with engines that could do figures of eight round the entire Jamaican Navy.
Ellie and Holmes kept their mouths shut but Gingerman didn’t. He talked all the way, even when Holmes told him they couldn’t hear a thing. From the shore, it looked like a beautiful day to be out on a boat; light winds, no waves to speak of and no clouds either. But out of the turquoise shallows and suddenly the water looked dark, cold and dangerous, as though it was the deep ocean only a few hundred metres from land. A swell came out of nowhere, slapping hard against the boat.
Less than fifteen minutes from shore and Gingerman shouted to get their attention. He gestured towards a large boat racing towards them. It was a large military-style inflatable craft, big enough so that if you had a couple of them and a pretext, you could invade a small island nation. This one had half-a-dozen crew; highly trained, physical kind of people with savagely short haircuts.
The two boats bounced together; a couple of the crew hooked onto Gingerman’s boat and a guy with binoculars shouted across.
“Where you headed?”
“What’s that to you?” said Gingerman, wanting to get all tough with a gang of highly trained killers. “We can go for a boat ride if we like.”
“We want to go to Plutus. We’re looking for our friend, Nadia,” shouted Holmes against the wind.
“We are with Plutus,” said the captain, and they could hear the Russian accent as he repeated the name that was painted on the prow of his boat.
“Can you take us on board?”
Instead of answering, the Russian talked on the radio. “You two, come with me,” he said, pointing at Holmes and Ellie.
Holmes told Gingerman that they didn’t need him to go any further.
Gingerman said, “No refunds.”
Holmes said that didn’t matter, but in that case, the deal with Ellie was off. Gingerman laughed again and thumped Holmes on the shoulder as he stepped towards the Russian boat. The Russian pulled out his phone. “I take your picture.”
Holmes didn’t want that.
“Security,” said the man. “No picture. No boat.”
Grumbling, Holmes let him take his picture and then scrambled awkwardly onto the Russian boat. Ellie was behind him. She stopped and said a few words to Gingerman. He nodded and she shook his hand.
As she sat next to him, Holmes said, “What did you say to Gingerman?”
Ellie said, “I asked him to tell the police what had happened if we didn’t make it back this afternoon.”
Holmes shook his head. “You think a drug smuggler is going to go to the police?”
Ellie said, “Why do you say he’s a drug smuggler?”
Holmes said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he makes all his money by giving rides round the bay to orphans.”
Ellie had a sharp retort but it was lost in the wind as the pilot opened up the big engines and the prow came up in the air and the acceleration forced them back into their seats.
19
Plutus was moored a way off the coast in the curve of a little bay about a half a mile from where Holmes and Ellie were intercepted. The boat was travelling fast and Ellie sat a couple of seats away from Holmes, fussing with her hair in the wind. Holmes studied the yacht as they approached. It was huge and dark black, like a stealth bomber, and it seemed to suck all the light from the bay.
Then their boat changed course and headed towards a much smaller, uglier boat moored closer into the shore.
When it was clear that this was their destination, Holmes studied it more closely. It looked like it might have been an old supply ship for the oil rigs. There was a square helicopter platform welded onto the rear superstructure of the boat giving it an air of ugliness and functionality. The name on the side was Mars, registered in Panama.
As the pilot slowed on their approach, Holmes shouted in Ellie’s ear, “What the hell is this?”
“Don’t you know anything?” she said with a superior tone that Holmes could hear above the wind and waves. “This is the shadow yacht. This is where the security checks are.”
As they docked alongside, Ellie told Holmes some things he didn’t know about rich people and yachts.
She said, “Really rich people don’t want the staff to sleep on their main yacht, so they have another one, or in the case of Plutus, they have two yachts. One for the security teams and the helicopters and all the kit, and another one for the domestic staff.”
Holmes figured that the cost of the extra boats alone could fund Justice Unlimited for the next thirty years, but Ellie wasn’t interested in that kind of calculation.
“Before the party, they brought us here so we could go through a security check.”
Oliver said, “Who has a security check at a party?”
Ellie said, “The guy who owns the boat, Volkov, he stole billions. During the transition from communism to a market economy in Russia in the nineties, there was an outbreak of corruption and criminality. Gangster capitalism took over.
When the state broke down, there was a brutal struggle to steal everything they could. Gold, diamonds, oil, forests…they took everything. Volkov was as ruthless as anyone. He killed a lot of people so he could get control of a mine in Siberia. He’s still got enemies.”
Oliver looked at her in astonishment. “Where did you get that from?”
Ellie laughed. “You thought I was a dumb bimbo, right?”
Oliver said, “You kind of gave that impression.”
Ellie said, “No. You saw miniskirt and big tits and made some bad assumptions because you’re a dinosaur. Slutty and smart is OK now.”
Oliver didn’t feel great about that. He said, “I’m sorry. That’s not the kind of mistake I usually make.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ellie said. “When people pay for my time, they can have any kind of Ellie they want. Most men want the bimbo. I put myself through university acting dumb and I fooled smarter guys than you.”
Holmes smiled ruefully at Ellie, and to his surprise, she smiled back. It wasn’t much of a smile but it was a start.
As soon as they came alongside Mars, a guard gestured that they should come aboard. Ellie and Holmes climbed a few stairways and were shown into a large cabin that was furnished like the lorry driver’s cafe on a cross-channel ferry.
While they waited for someone to come and talk to them in En
glish, Holmes tried to raise the subject of Nikki without actually mentioning her name.
Ellie said, “I know you want to talk about her, but I don’t want to get into the middle of that.”
“She’s changed so much since I knew her.”
Ellie said, “You’re hung up on her still. I get that. But take my advice, she’s not for you. She’s going to be really, really rich and marry some great guy and have this fabulous life. No offence, but she’s out of your league. Let her go.”
“Marrying somebody rich, is that your be-all and end-all?”
“Who’s the dumbo now? You didn’t listen. I said she’s going to be really rich. I didn’t say she was going to marry somebody rich.”
Holmes said, “I like it better now you’re back to insulting me.”
“Get used to it.”
“So how’s she going to be rich if it isn’t by marrying somebody?”
“She’s got this really great idea for a business. It’s brilliant. She’ll make a fortune.”
Holmes asked her what the idea was but Ellie wouldn’t tell him. “Ask Nikki.”
He tried to persuade her but she wasn’t giving away anything else. Then a couple of the security guards walked in and the interrogation started.
20
Jerry was not a good sailor. He didn’t like to stay on board any of Volkov’s ships more than he had to. He preferred being on land, following the little convoy on its rotation through the Caribbean on commercial flights or hopping on the Gulfstream whenever he could. But when he did have to be aboard, he had a small office and cabin on the Iris, which was Volkov’s shadow yacht for the domestic staff. Bored one day, Jerry looked up who Iris was and found she was the Greek goddess who was servant to the other Greek gods. No delusions of grandeur there then.
He was sitting in his office, staring at the paused video image on his computer screen and running through his current list of swear words, when Malkin walked in. He didn’t knock, just walked in and said, “When were you planning to tell me?”
Jerry said, “Once I’d figured out how to handle it.”
Malkin said, “This one we do together.” He pointed at the screen and said, “Talk to me.”
Jerry’s computer showed the surveillance video from the interview room on Mars. The image of Oliver Holmes and Ellie in their chairs was frozen on the screen.
“We picked them up on their way to Plutus on some hired boat. She’s one of the hookers from the party whose friend went missing.”
Malkin said, “Name?”
“Ellie White is her working name.”
“Important?”
Jerry said, “She’s just fluff.”
“Who’s the guy?”
Jerry said, “This tall, handsome dude is Oliver W. Holmes. We cloned his phone when they went through security and it seems like he’s here to help out the hookers looking for their friend.”
“Law enforcement?”
“Not exactly.”
Jerry rocked back in his chair and pulled a couple of sheets of paper from the printer and offered them to Malkin. Malkin waved them away and said, “Just give me the top line.”
“He’s a human rights investigator. Good one too. He’s been responsible for bringing some difficult cases to the International Criminal Court in The Hague – dictators, warlords, genocidal killers, that kind of thing. He hasn’t got many write-ups, but where he does, they call him ‘tenacious’.”
“Just what this day needed, a tenacious investigator,” Malkin said. “Why would the ICC be bothering us?”
Malkin had eaten a little too much garlic the night before and Jerry tried to keep as far away from the man’s breath as he could but it wasn’t easy in the tight space of his office. He said, “If you’d read the file, you’d know that he doesn’t work for them anymore. There seems to have been some unpleasantness along the way and he skipped over to a US-based NGO called Justice Unlimited.”
“Still doesn’t explain what he’s doing bothering us.”
Jerry said, “I got a couple of emails off his phone. Reading between the lines, one of the hookers was an ex-girlfriend.”
Gesturing at the screen, Malkin said, “Did they get anything?”
“No. Javier stonewalled them. Sent them back to Montego Bay.”
Malkin didn’t like that. “So, what’s your plan?”
Jerry said, “I’m going to figure out a way to neutralise him.”
Malkin said, “Smear him as a paedophile, burn his house down, slaughter his family kind of thing?”
“I wasn’t going to be that subtle, but yeah.”
Malkin said, “Not this one.”
After Jerry’s inevitable “Why?” Malkin said, “Think about it. What would our reaction have been if we actually had lost a member of staff, a guest and a jet-ski?”
Jerry said, “We’d have flipped out about the jet-ski. You know how much those things cost?”
“Save the jokes for someone who thinks you’re funny.”
Jerry thought about it and said, “OK, we would be out there searching, we’d be sympathetic to the hooker’s friends, we’d have contacted the local police, put out a reward…”
Malkin said, “And how many of those things have you done?”
“The police are on it. They should find the jet-ski like now.”
“And the hookers?”
Jerry’s silence said everything that needed to be said.
“From now on, you are going to liaise with the hookers and this guy Holmes. Give them anything they want. Plus I want you to offer a reward and get the Jamaican police onto this.”
Jerry told his boss that he didn’t like that idea.
Malkin said, “You say that as though you think your opinion matters to me.”
Jerry said, “It’s the wrong play.”
“And I’ve told you three times, don’t use the word ‘play’ when you’re talking to me. You’re not a quarterback. This isn’t a game.”
Jerry said, “OK. Strategy, tactics whatever. Forget that stuff…We can just take this guy out in the usual way. Ambush on a quiet road, body disappears. You said yourself, they got no body, they don’t convict.”
“You’re not listening. Call this Holmes and offer them everything they need. We keep them close and we find out what they’re thinking, what they’re doing. It’s better for us…”
Jerry said, “Find out where they are weakest and then strike quickly and with overwhelming force.”
“Worked for Sun Tzu, it can work for us…”
Malkin’s phone rang. He looked at the caller ID onscreen and pressed the go-away button. “What do you suppose Mr De Laney wants to talk to me about?”
Jerry said, “I have no idea.”
Malkin said, “First right answer you’ve given me all day.” As he stepped out of the cabin, he told Jerry he wanted hourly updates.
Jerry waited until Malkin had closed the door before he got back to his list of swear words, only this time he did it with feeling.
21
The butler was a tall snooty guy who had a face on him like someone had trodden in something. He had fooled everyone else that he was from some family who had worked in service to the English aristocracy for generations. But Malkin knew that for a lie. De Laney had been an actor in kids’ TV programmes in the 1990s. Things hadn’t worked out for him in television land, so he re-trained as a butler. Apparently, failed actors make the best butlers because they are so good at masking the contempt they feel for their employers.
De Laney was working in his office on Iris when Malkin strolled in and said, “The answer is ‘no’.”
Flustered, DeLaney said, “But I haven’t even asked you anything.”
“You called me.”
“Yes but…”
Malkin said, “The only reason you would have for calling me is to complain that I re-assigned your steward and to ask for him to stay.”
“Well I…Yes.”
“Much as I love listening to your
fake snotty accent,” said Malkin, “I don’t have time to waste on going through this with you. The steward has been re-assigned. There is nothing further to discuss. He’s gone.”
De Laney said, “I don’t like your tone.”
Quick as a new computer, Malkin said, “I don’t care what you do, or don’t like. He’s gone.”
“Might I be permitted…?”
“No. You’ve got two options. You can threaten to resign unless I reinstate your steward, or you can suck it up.”
De Laney hadn’t learned. He tried to make a protest about the way he was being treated but Malkin ignored him. “You think you have some leverage because Mr Volkov has been through three butlers in the last four years and so the disruption of you leaving would cause problems, which is basically correct. But here’s why you’re not going to resign. You’ve got two years left on your contract, right?”
De Laney nodded.
“That means you only have to stick it out a while longer until you get the $1 million bonus. With the money that you’ve already got in the bank, plus the fact that you’re not spending any of your wages, it means you’re going to have close to $2 million tax free to spend on that riverside property you keep looking at on the internet. You are not going to give that up just to save some steward that you’re sweet on. So, you accept the decision and move on. Butler.”
De Laney stood his ground. He said, “The title I agreed with Mr Volkov was chief of staff. I am not a butler.”
Malkin said, “You run two hundred staff over four yachts and a couple of properties. All you have to do is make sure there’s food on the table, clean sheets on the bed and ice in the ice buckets. You’re a butler as far as I’m concerned.”
“And as the chief of staff I would take it as a professional courtesy if you discussed it with me before firing any of my key employees.”
Malkin was finished with the conversation. He said, “We’ve got forty guests coming on board for Mr Volkov’s dinner tonight. You’ve got some things to organise, haven’t you?”