Tench came to see him, flushed and jovial like the Spirit of Christmas Present, bearing a bunch of red roses and a basket of green grapes.
‘Still playing with yourself, my son?’ he said amiably. ‘You look well. Have you out of here in no time!’
‘And out of the Force too, I hear, Toby,’ said Dog.
‘You wouldn’t want to stay, would you?’ said Tench.
‘I like to make my own decisions,’ said Dog, dealing five cards.
Tench turned them up. A royal.
‘So I see,’ he said. ‘Well, maybe we can do something there.’
Dog eyed him coldly. This was a different tune from the one that Parslow had said the Branch was singing. He slipped the cards back into the pack, shuffled, cut, dealt again. Tench turned them up again. It was the same hand.
‘Clever,’ said Tench. ‘That Oliver Beck’s clever too. Only he plays cards with people. Makes them disappear. You’ve got to admire him, Dog.’
‘Why?’
‘Just think about it. He must’ve been planning the big drop-out for yonks. I mean, even the thick Micks are going to notice they’re three million light in the end. But suddenly he finds he’s got himself a family to disappear too. Does he panic? No. He’s got his own little hidey hole all set up by now, but he doesn’t want to risk taking Janey and the kid directly there. No way he can fake all three deaths, and a trio on the move leaves too big a trail. So he uses her to authenticate his own demise, leaves her completely in the dark about his destination just in case anyone gets to her, and sets up this other cover so he’ll be able to get access to her whenever he thinks the time is ripe.’
‘The Blake scam, you mean?’
‘That’s it.’ Tench shook his head admiringly. ‘Over three years ago it started. He must have pumped Janey for details of her family, and every time he made one of his little trips across the pond, he’d divert to see Mrs Maguire and chat about her brother, the priest. There is a Father Blake who does the job he claimed, a big, bearded fellow, so his cover went really deep. And when our lot and the Micks started sniffing around Janey’s connections after the drowning, who was going to pay any attention to a priest who’d been a friend of the family for years? Brilliant!’
The cards were flying in Dog’s fingers, expanding and contracting like a squeeze box.
He said, ‘Did she know?’
He’d asked a similar question of Thrale. Then it hadn’t mattered any more. Now …
‘Know he was IRA, you mean? Or that he was coming for her at Christmas? Who can tell, Dog? Who can tell?’ said Tench, almost sympathetically. ‘All we can assume is he was planning to contact her and the boy during their Christmas visit to Northampton. Only, when he met you at the old lady’s that day, suddenly it was a new ball game. He was up shit creek and he stuck to you, Dog, ’cos you were the nearest thing he could find to a paddle. Good instinct as it turned out, even if you did lead him into that farce at the quarry. He struck out on his own after that, somehow psyched Thrale into leading him to the cottage. Clever, that. Any sod who can psych Jonty Thrale gets my vote for cunning bastard of the month. But he only comes out equal first with you, Dog. My God, I wish I could have got you on my team! But maybe it’s not too late, eh?’
Here it comes, thought Dog.
‘What do you want, Toby?’ he said.
‘What do you mean, old son?’
‘There’s no such thing as a free bunch of grapes,’ said Dog.
‘These grapes are seedless, my boy,’ said Tench. ‘Slide down a treat, and nothing left to show you’ve had ’em, know what I mean?’
‘Tell me.’
Tench pulled his chair closer to the bedside.
‘No fooling you, is there, Dog? All right, here’s the pitch. You’d think my guvnor would be well pleased with me for smashing the Thrale cell, wouldn’t you? But he’s a hard man to satisfy and all he can say is corpses can’t talk, not even Irish corpses.’
‘You’ve got Bridie Heighway,’ said Dog.
‘Yeah. But what have we got her for? Kidnapping? There’s no evidence with that red-headed tart long gone. We’ve got her tied in with most of Thrale’s ops, but it’s all circumstantial, and as Thrale’s not going to come up for trial now, we can’t even look for a spin-off result, can we? Time was when I’d have typed out a full confession, stuck a Sterling up her fanny and invited her to sign. But an admission’s not good enough any more, not without AV support and a deposition from the Virgin Mary. And I doubt if Bridie would have signed anyway. She’s a hard nut, that one. But Beck now …’
‘What about Beck?’
‘Well, he’s travelling heavy now, isn’t he? Woman and a kid pin you down in all kinds of ways. If we can find out where he is, he’s ours.’
‘Time it takes for extradition, he’d be drawing his pension, even supposing he’s somewhere that’s got a treaty with us.’
‘Extradition? Who gives a fuck about extradition? Christ, if we bring this guy to trial, best we can hope for is a five stretch on what we’ve got on him. No. What we want is not him inside, but what’s inside him. In his noddle. Supergrass of the century, he’d be. And he’s there for the squeezing once we can track him down.’
Dog said, ‘You mean, we tell him we’ll leak his whereabouts to the IRA unless he cooperates, is that it?’
‘Bang on. Offer he can’t refuse, wouldn’t you say?’ said Tench, with jovial complacency. And this is where you might be able to help us, Dog. You spent a lot of time with him, OK, I know he was Blake then, but maybe he said something which, looking back and knowing what you do now, might give us a pointer. I know you, my son. Every last syllable he spoke will be fixed in your bonce. And the girl too. You got pretty close to her, didn’t you? Anything she might have let slip. Just give us it all verbatim, my boy, and we’ll go over it with a fine tooth comb. Though maybe we won’t need to. Maybe you’ve got a scent already, Dog! You’re the talk of the Branch, I tell no lie, the way you sussed things out all on your tod. We’d be glad to have you aboard, all of us!’
He paused. Dog had closed his eyes. Only the cards in his hands still moved.
Then he said, ‘Down and dirty, Toby. If I help, if I can help, I get to stay a cop, no criminal charges, no disciplinary hearing even?’
‘You help me out on this one, Dog, and I think I can even guarantee a promotion in a few months once the dust has settled,’ said Tench. ‘Do we have a deal? What have you got?’
Dog smiled and dealt a hand.
‘Let’s see what you’ve got first of all, Toby.’
Slowly he turned up the cards. Two, three, five, seven, eight, every suit.
‘Well, what have we here? All rags, Toby. A real bag of shit. And you’re trying to bluff me off the pot with that! Forget it. You have to be desperate even to think of trying this game, old son!’
Tench sat very still for a while, and all his jollity drained from him.
Finally he stood up.
‘You’re a fool,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wondered how anyone so fucking clever can be so fucking stupid. You’re finished, Dog. You must know that. Out of the Force, that’s for certain. And if I’ve got anything to do with it, it won’t end there. You’ve broken the law, my son. You’ve aided and abetted criminals to evade justice, you’ve obstructed police enquiries, you’ve illegally accessed and misused confidential security files, you’ve assaulted one of my officers … Oh, I reckon we can close the door on you for a couple of years at least, old son.’
He turned to leave.
Dog said, ‘As long as I don’t have to share a cell with Tommy Stott.’
Tench froze.
‘Not that they won’t be falling over themselves at the Scrubs to be bunking down with a good-looking boy like Tommy,’ said Dog.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ snarled Tench, spinning round.
‘They had a pipe into your section,’ said Dog. ‘Stands to reason. Thrale knew things. Has to be Tommy Stott. I’ll give you chapte
r and verse if you like, but there’s a simpler test. If you want to know the time, ask a policeman, and if he looks at a Cartier watch, you can be sure he’s bent.’
‘You’re living in the past,’ said Tench, recovering. ‘Anyone can get a five thou Swiss watch for a pony these days, long as you don’t mind it being made in Hong Kong.’
‘It’s real. Real as his Gaultier labels. I can tell,’ said Dog. Then he frowned. ‘So can you, Toby. Let’s have another look at this flop before I bet.’
He thought a moment then smiled.
‘You knew!’ he said. ‘Of course. That explains a lot. Tommy was only feeding Thrale what you wanted fed to him. He was doubling, in other words.’
‘Well done, Dog. You’ve got there,’ applauded Tench. ‘I admit everything. It was a set-up to fool the Micks. So where’s that leave you, old son? With egg on your face, as per usual.’
His mockery didn’t quite ring true.
Dog smiled and said, ‘Now I’ve got it. OK, it was a set-up, but I reckon it was a private arrangement, not one with your bosses’ official seal of approval.’
‘Now why should I want to do anything crazy like that?’
‘First, it put you and you alone on the inside lane, not having to share any info with the rest of the Branch. Second, it probably meant you didn’t have to be too choosy what info you passed to the Irish. In fact, knowing you, Toby, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d deliberately nobbled some of your oppos’ operations if they looked like getting too much credit for them. And thirdly, which explains Tommy’s timepiece, not going through official channels means you and your boy friend get to keep the IRA sweet money!’
He could see that each of his inferences hit home.
But Tench was an old pro, well versed in riding the storm, covering up till his chance to counter came.
‘Good try, Dog,’ he said. ‘Pity your credit’s so low just now. The more you badmouth me, the deeper the shit’s going to pile up over you. Do yourself a favour. Keep your head down and your mouth shut and maybe you’ll get off with a suspended sentence, OK?’
‘Now that’s big of you, Toby,’ said Dog. ‘Only I wasn’t really thinking of trying to convince the authorities, was I? Like you say, who’s going to listen to me, unless I’ve got absolute evidence?’
‘I’m glad you’ve still got some sense left …’ began Tench, but Dog interrupted.
‘No. It was a real question, Toby, not rhetorical. Who’s going to listen? I’ll tell you. A lot of big ears in Dublin and in Belfast, that’s who. They’ll put your Tommy on the same list as Oliver Beck, men who’ve fooled them out of hard cash. And we know how they like to deal with people like that, don’t we?’
‘What are you trying to say, Dog?’ said Tench softly.
‘I just want to be sure you’re joking about these criminal charges,’ said Dog. ‘So what’s it to be, Toby? Me walking free, or Tommy Stott not walking at all? Take your time. I’m curious to see if there really is another person in this world you care about.’
There was. The pain in Tench’s eyes told him that, though probably most of it came from having to acknowledge such a weakness. But one thing you had to give the man, he didn’t mess around when the cards were down.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve got it. No charges, no trial. But you’re out of the Force, no way will I fix that.’
Dog shrugged and nodded. There was no pain. He said, ‘I was going anyway.’
‘Yeah. If I were you, I’d keep going, Dog. As far as you can get.’
‘Oh, I shall,’ said Dog Cicero. ‘I shall.’
2
The old man was thin to the point of emaciation. The tee shirt he wore hung so loosely on his narrow rib cage that its inscription THE CHAMP was almost unreadable in the folds. But his eyes still shone bright in the wrinkled olive face and his step as he came across the room was steady, though slow.
‘Dog? Is this really you? At last you’ve come to see me after all this time! Come here, let me be sure you’re real.’
He folded Dog in his arms, ran his hands over his back and shoulders, pushed him away and put one hand up to his frozen face, touched it lightly with his fingertips.
‘Hey, they did good work. At your father’s funeral, it still looked like old Scarface had just climbed out of the grave, but now … OK, maybe it don’t move so good, but that’s no disadvantage when you’re trying to finesse a pot with a pair of deuces.’
‘Uncle Endo, it’s great to see you,’ said Dog Cicero, with warm affection. ‘And you’re looking very fit.’
‘Fit? You think that, maybe you should think about a guide dog. Vincent, no need to stand there looking menacing. This is him, my nephew, Giuliano, known as Dog. I gave him the name and you know why?’
‘Because he’s got no dog in him,’ said the man called Vincent. He it was who had escorted Dog from the hotel lobby to the penthouse suite after a long telephone consultation. He wore a soberly expensive suit and horn-rimmed bifocals and could have been a banker, except that bankers, in Britain anyway, rarely had perfect tans, an athlete’s muscle tone, and a Benelli B76 tucked under their left armpit.
He smiled now as he took Dog’s hand and shook it.
‘Welcome to Vegas, Dog. We’ve heard a lot about you from Endo over the years. Glad you finally made it here.’
There was a hint of reproach. As if he was saying that an old man shouldn’t be kept waiting so long for a visit from his favourite nephew.
Endo heard it too and clearly didn’t like it. He was a man who would make his own reproaches.
‘OK, Vincent,’ he said. ‘We’ll catch you, later, huh? Dog and me have got a lot of talking to do.’
‘Sure. Nice to meet you, Dog.’
He left. Endo said, ‘Take no notice of Vincent. He gets a bit over-protective, like I’m in my dotage or something.’
‘He’s obviously wrong there,’ smiled Dog. ‘But he’s right. I should have come earlier.’
‘But you didn’t, worrying like you musta done about the company I keep. No need to look embarrassed! All the boasting I’ve done about my marvellous nephew over the years, you don’t think I ever let on you’d become a cop!’
The two men laughed together, then Dog said, ‘No need to worry any more, Uncle Endo. I quit.’
‘Yeah? Well, me too. This is a legitimate concern except maybe for a bit of laundering in the casino. What are we standing here for? Come and sit down.’
He led the way through into a long, cool room with a mosaic floor, a high frescoed ceiling, and windows with old-fashioned wooden shutters. The walls were hung with settecento paintings which to Dog’s untutored eye looked genuine, as did the classical busts and assorted statuary displayed on plinths about the room.
‘You like it?’ said Endo, observing him keenly.
‘It’s fantastic,’ said Dog.
‘Fantastic? Yeah, that’s the word,’ said Endo. ‘A real fantasy. I always told myself ever since I came to this country, if I got rich I would go back home and buy myself one of those fancy villas, a palazzo even. But when push came to shove, I didn’t want it. I went back on a visit, and it was OK, but I knew it wasn’t for me. Too far from any real action, know what I mean? Then I thought, what the hell, in Vegas they got everything, Caesar’s Palace, Circus-Circus, Aladdin’s, the Sahara, you name it, we’ve got it. So why shouldn’t I indulge myself with my own custom-built palazzo? Sit down. Let me fix you a drink. What’ll it be?’
‘A glass of Barolo would be perfect, if you have one,’ said Dog gravely.
The old man chortled.
‘Still them good eyes, Dog! Still taking everything in, looking for the best angles! If I’ve got one!’
He went to a distant corner where, half hidden by a huge porcelain lamp, stood an open bottle of Barolo.
Returning with two brimming glasses, he said, ‘And now let’s talk.’
Talk they did, for more than an hour, mainly of the old days; of Dog’s childhood which the old man
, despite the distance separating them for most of their lives, seemed to recollect better than Dog; of Endo’s early adventures in the New World, and above all of cards; of famous pots, of towering triumphs and deep-plunging disasters, of players – the great, the eccentric, the rash, the cautious, the successful, the broken – and at some point a deck of cards appeared on the table between them and they started playing their own version of seven card stud called Cheat ’Em, in which anything went, and the only rule was you didn’t get caught. The old man’s fingers weren’t what they used to be, and Dog let several blatant substitutions pass till finally he said, ‘OK, I’ve got you this time’.
‘You think so,’ said the old man. ‘So what have I got and why shouldn’t I have it?’
Dog studied Endo’s show cards. A pair of red fives, deuce of clubs, ace of spades. His own show was king of spades, six of clubs, and two aces, clubs and diamonds.
‘You’re guessing you’ll have to beat a house,’ he said. ‘Could be aces up, so you’ll need a four which means you’ve got yourself the other two fives in the hole, only I stacked the five of clubs two hands back along with the king of diamonds, king of spades, ten of hearts, eight of hearts, six of hearts, four of diamonds and trey of diamonds.’
‘So you’re calling me. You want to put money?’
‘As much as you like,’ said Dog.
Slowly the old man turned up his hole cards. They were rags, not a five in sight.
‘You crafty sod,’ exploded Dog. ‘You let me see you fiddling the cards so I’d have to call you.’
Endo laughed with real pleasure.
‘Fingers ain’t what they were, Dog, but like I always told you, nothing’s so bad you can’t make use of it, if you look at it right. Now why don’t you tell me what brings you here?’
As always the old man had got it right. Through the talk and the cards they had got past the awkwardness of long separation and rediscovered in each other those ties of family, of thought, of affection which bound them so close together.
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