Charlie

by Finn Óg

  We entered a beautiful building on the edge of the old town, marble steps, open foyer, and severe-looking security guards. The woman at a central workstation appeared no less humourless, and greeted us with a stare rather than a smile. She said nothing, but the vacuum was filled by my bright companion, who managed to woo the woman out of her Soviet slumber. At one point, I actually saw her blink. Something got written on a piece of paper, and then we were at a computer terminal in another room, and then we were on the street again, walking alongside a tram. Vilnius struck me as city of two halves – the first a riddle of old cobbled streets and beautiful renaissance hotels and homes, the second a downtown area pleading for seediness and sex, and bling and big, black BMWs.

  Eventually we arrived at an imposing, dilapidated construction. Our feet crunched in the snow as the girl stared up at the hundreds of broken windows above us. All around us were cracked streets and pavements falling into the gutters. An occasional fast food outlet stared onto the wasteland from which grew this Soviet bloc of a building. The girl eventually looked at me. “He’s in there.”

  “Really? What is it?”

  “Is a prison.”

  “Bollocks,” I said in disappointment. She looked confused.

  “You don’t want a murderer in jail?”

  “No. Yes. Of course. But, I wanted, you know, to get someone to interview him. To expose him.”

  “Then you’re lucky,” she said.

  And then we were on the march again, and I was getting fed up with her lack of communication, and I tried to seek some answers. “Right, where are we going now and why am I lucky?”

  “You are very, very lucky,” she said. “He is to be at court today, and my uncle works at the court.”

  To be fair, that did strike me as very, very lucky, and a little unlucky, because a court didn’t sound like an ideal place to snuff someone and get away with it. And my priority had to be to get away with it, or Isla would be left alone.

  The girl was a whirlwind of energy. I could barely keep up with her as she wound me through the streets of Vilnius. We passed minimalist shops selling watches worth thousands, and markets for the poor which looked like little more than food banks. The place began to remind me of Moscow, where people appeared to be either destitute, or filthy, horribly, braggingly rich; the post-Soviet state of the nations which escaped. We eventually stopped on what looked like the main street, and she turned to face an imposing building with unnecessarily high doors, hung between gargantuan pillars.

  “Wait here,” she commanded, her bossiness betraying a desire to impress. I was on her turf, and she was evidently competent. As I stood there, I mused over how much time this woman had saved me. I reckon I can find just about anyone, just about anywhere. But it takes time. Where there are language barriers and where the Irish charm falls dead, as I suspected it would in this monosyllabic society, it could be a struggle. This woman was a bustling little dynamo, who seemed to have endless resourcefulness, and contacts, and I did, indeed, feel very, very lucky.

  When she emerged, she was excited. She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “He can get you in!”

  I shook my head in wonder. Less than twenty-four hours after we’d landed, she had me a face-to-face. Of course, I had absolutely no idea what I would do with this opportunity, so I needed to think fast. “When’s he due up?”

  “What?”

  “When will he be here?”

  She looked at her watch for effect. “Three hours.”

  This was, frankly, not the best news. I thanked my new friend, and agreed to meet her later that day. She looked disappointed, but I couldn’t really think of any gentle way to shake her, other than to offer to pay her for her time. She declined, which suggested to me that she was enjoying the excitement of it all as much as the prospect of being paid. And, of course, not taking the money kept her in the game for more fun later. This irritated me, as I didn’t want to bring any trouble her way, or towards her uncle, and I needed that one-to-one with the killer.

  The solution, as ever, presented itself as I haggled with the girl over her refusal to accept payment. An arse-about-face negotiation, I accept. I took a gamble, and asked her for guidance. “Do you know diabetes?”

  “Of course,” she said, moderately offended. “You need insulin?”

  “Yes.” What I needed was what came with it.

  “Ok,” she sighed, and we were off again, through the pretty part of town this time. Eventually we came to a cavernous chemist’s, where she put out her hand to me for cash, and stomped off. I heard her barking orders at a fat woman in a white coat. They had an argument, the younger woman prevailed, and came back with a vial.

  “Thank you,” I said, “but I need the needle too, the syringe.”

  “Why you not bring with you?”

  Good question. “Left it at the hotel.”

  “You must stay far away,” was all she said as she turned and set-to with the pharmacist once more. We emerged victorious, and it was really time to part ways. I explained I would meet her at the court in two hours, and she agreed.

  I’d spotted a metal works on the far side of the train tracks as we’d walked towards the jail. It was so close, yet so far away, as there did not appear to be any means of getting over the line. Eventually I gave up looking and skipped over the barrier, ran over the sleepers, and hurled myself at the fence on the far side. A ten-minute run took me to the gates of the factory, and the rapid click and buzz of welders told me I was in the correct place.

  I worked quietly around the far side of the imposing shed, and found the delivery bay. Standing three barrels tall, in bright blue, with the universal skull symbols on them, was the stock of what I imagined to be hydrofluoric acid. It was a distant memory, but I recalled the warnings to stay away from this stuff when I’d trained at a rigging factory as a teenager. It’s used to clean stainless steel, and we were told in no uncertain terms that a drop of the stuff on your skin could cause multiple organ failure. Because of the language of the writing, I had no idea if it was definitely what I wanted, but I had no time, and no other option. I broke the seal, and gingerly filled half a centimetre of the syringe, carefully replacing the needle cover.

  Back in Vilnius centre I hunted for a gorilla pit. With only one hour left, I became a little desperate. At a slow jog, I covered about a mile, and eventually caught sight of a York sign above a door. Some brands are universal. I bounded upstairs and as I opened a door into a weights gym, every shaven, thick, robot head in the room rotated slowly towards me.

  The next bit was tricky. I did my usual, “Do you speak English?” except I was speaking Russian, which was far from ideal. One powder monkey stepped forward and shrugged. “A little,” he seemed to suggest. I then used sign language to explain what I needed, eventually miming an injection into the buttock, and he nodded, and called someone else over. I was motioned into a changing room, nervous that I was on shaky ground. I was confident enough however, that my build was sufficient to suggest I threw a few barbells about.

  The second man rooted in his bag and produced a small but familiar-looking container, the type that some of my pals had used when bulking up post-training. I’d seen them shoot that shit into their arses, I’d seen the nose bleeds as they squatted and pressed, and gradually got too big to move quickly.

  I paid the man and left. After a pause in a side street to add the steroids to the acid, I made for the court. I had no idea how long the syringe would last with all that stuff in it, and it felt warm to the touch.

  My translator was waiting for me at the steps. She ushered me inside and took me to a man in uniform, who declined to greet me or to shake my outstretched hand. He opened a door and walked me down a series of corridors into a room, where he left me without uttering a single word. Suited me fine.

  After an hour, the door opened and two alarmingly attired policemen came in. They had the whole outfit; batons, kneepads, elbow pads, padded baseball hats, stab jackets, handguns. I thought f
or a moment that I’d been screwed, and that I was about to be lifted. Then they hauled in a man about my size, and I knew I was looking at Shannon’s killer.

  He was fair, scarred, and snarling. This bastard looked like he craved conflict. He stared at me, goading me, confident that he could fight, despite the fact that his arms were secured behind his back. I opted for authority and nodded to the police officers to leave, which, amazingly, they did. It was just him and I, and at that point his attitude changed. His eyes narrowed and he began to regard me again, wondering who I was.

  “You murdered my wife,” I told him.

  His pupils widened involuntarily, and I knew I had the right man. His mind plainly couldn’t keep up with the confusion of seeing me there. Maybe it was my accent, maybe he had seen me around our village when I was home on leave. Regardless, he knew he was in the shit. I chose not to spend time with a dead man, stepped forward, and plunged the syringe into his thigh.

  I stepped back as he screamed and kicked, hopeful that it would take hours, if not days, for him to die. Traces of steroids would not attract any attention in a prison. I was confident that a place like that would be awash with anabolic. I didn’t care how they explained the acid. I suspected that they would ignore it, assuming they bothered with an autopsy at all.

  Three hours later, and having spent all of my cash on a translator, her uncle, steroids, and a teddy for Isla, I was back at the airport, twitching for my flight to London to be called. If I could get through security at Heathrow, I was home and hosed. Another little bit of the re-build was complete.

  Twelve

  “Just fooking leave me alone.”

  I stared at the girl. She could not have been more than seventeen years old. She was swaying on top of soiled sheets, but in her head, she could well have been floating on clean, crisp clouds. I couldn’t begin to imagine what had been pumped into her. She could barely sit, never mind stand. Her arms flailed around, as she grappled for purchase in the putrid air of the tiny room.

  I didn’t have to force entry. The door was wide open, and the smell of perfume and rubber tumbled down the stairwell. The charity woman had sent me to the address, a block of flats in Tallaght, Southwest Dublin. I had taken few precautions; I didn’t intend to hurt anyone. Well, nobody who didn’t deserve it, or who didn’t try to hurt me first.

  The charity woman had told me that there were at least three girls in the flat. I could only locate two, which was a bit of a worry, but also a waste of money, as I’d hired a people-carrier at the airport. If the intel had been accurate, I would have rented a smaller vehicle which would have been easier to park, and would have put a smaller dent in my dwindling finances.

  This girl lunged to the side of her bed and popped back up, shuddering like a diving board, her head wobbling furiously. I stooped to pick her up and recoiled instantly when I caught sight of the needle in her hand.

  “Wow wow now,” I spluttered, “I’m here to help you, I’m not gonna hurt you, I’m not a punter. I’m here to take you home.”

  “Fook-a off yourself,” she drawled. The poor kid was bombed beyond sense, and I was short on time.

  “Who runs this place?”

  She just stared at me. A voice came from behind.

  “I do.”

  I turned to face a well-preserved fifty-something woman, glamorous perhaps, hair in an ornate weave on top of her painstakingly crafted façade. I stared at her for as long as I could, trying to get a fix, but wary of the kid with the pointy, infection-ridden weapon to my right.

  The older one began to talk, confident and dismissive. “So, you’re here to help them, are you?”

  “What are you, like a madam or something?”

  “I am an employer,” she said. “And I also have an employer, and he will be back very soon.”

  God forgive me, but I had already considered flattening her by this point. Her selfishness made me cross, her willingness to treat these kids as tools. I knew the boss was a Romanian, but he’d obviously hired locally to give the whole grim escapade a native branding. The mutton was taking a phone from her bag, so I had to act.

  I took a step to my left and curled her phone arm behind her back. There was a leather strap, not unlike a belt, attached to a radiator. It was alarmingly moist, and I bound her hands to the headboard of the bed. It’s funny the things you think of; I rather imagined that this was not the first occasion on which someone had done that to the old pigeon. At least I hadn’t hurt her, not badly. I lifted her phone, and realised that the contacts on it might be of use to the charity.

  The woman was giving it loads by this stage. I muffled her by wrapping her head up nice and snug with semen-stained sheets, and rifled through her handbag. In it was a purse with at least a dozen neatly arranged credit cards. There was also a grisly and gnarled curl of fifty Euro notes, the proceeds of sex I assumed, and so due to the girls I’d been sent to rescue.

  The kid needed help. Shannon would have hugged her, used reason and psychology and empathy. I slapped the syringe out of her hand, found a bag under the bed and bucked every piece of non-kinky clothing into it. Then I hoisted her over my shoulder and carried her down the stairwell to the car. I left her in the back, but she started shouting and giving out, and I wished I’d brought someone else with me. I locked her in, but she was bouncing about so much that the alarm went off. That wasn’t acceptable, as someone would definitely call the Guards, and I still had another girl to get out of the flat. So, I took the first one back up with me again. It made me think about this story of the chicken and the fox and the boat, but I couldn’t remember the solution.

  At the top of the stairs I found the second girl, slightly older and moderately more sober, packed, and ready to go. “Thank fuck,” I said. The one over my shoulder was getting heavy-ish, and was still kicking. “Can you tell her to take it easy?”

  To my amazement, the second girl formed a fist and hit the kid with such force that the wriggling stopped. I didn’t really have time to reason that out. I just grunted and turned, and headed for the car. The aggressive one followed.

  I put them both in the back and started driving. The fact that the violent one was behind me made me cross. This whole extraction had been full of mistakes, and I resolved to ensure that the next one would be properly planned and risk assessed. I began to wonder what had happened to me. I was getting sloppy, and too easily distracted.

  As it turned out, breaking the girls out of the brothel was the least of my problems. I got to the Dublin airport, parked outside the shiny new departures terminal, and was immediately accosted by a Nazi parking attendant. He called a Garda when I told him to move aside. Then the bloody cop began to take an interest in the fact that I had what appeared to be two hookers in the back, and that one of them appeared to be heavily drugged. This was all incredibly inconvenient, so eventually I phoned the charity woman, who was supposed to be on the concourse awaiting our arrival.

  Except she wasn’t, which was something I would learn in this new business. Charity workers are brilliant people, but they are not altogether organised, and compared to the Navy, they’re next to useless when it comes to the execution of even the simplest operation. Their passion crowds their practicality, and they argue over how things ought to be done, even in the midst of actually doing them. This was my first exposure to such silliness. I got on the phone.

  Charity was late. It took a full fifteen minutes for her to arrive at the car, and to begin remonstrating with the cop. She, at least, had identification, and plane tickets for the girls. But the Garda wanted to know who I was, and I didn’t want anyone to know that. Then the charity woman wanted to know why one of the girls was half-conscious, and I wanted to know why any of that mattered in the circumstances. As far as I could see there were two issues – getting rid of the cop, and catching the flight.

  Just to put a lid on proceedings, a massive white Mercedes pulled up and a shaven-headed thug emerged. He simply walked forward, grabbed girl number two by the up
per arm, and led her away. I looked to the sky and wondered how, for the Love of God, I had ended up in this bloody situation, and looked to the Garda to intervene. The Garda looked terrified, so I spoke to him directly to try to shake him out of his frozen state.

  “This is now a kidnap situation, and you are allowing two vulnerable women to be taken against their will. What do you intend to do about it?”

  “I, I…. I’ll radio for assistance.”

  “Well, I, I, will have to sort this bloody mess out while you panic, you prick,” I said, and was forced, in full view of about twenty security cameras, to deal with the skinhead.

  That bloke had balls. To try to take two women, on his own-ee-oh, in front of an ex-Marine, a cop, a woman, and a jobs-worth traffic attendant. As he came back to my hire-car to get the drugged kid, I walked around him and slashed his tyres on the passenger side. Of course, he got cross, and we had to face one another. The whole thing became quite convoluted and took a short age, but eventually I managed to come out on top, with a chewed ear and a possible broken nose. The charity woman hurried the girls inside.

  As I drove away I caught the reflection of the Irish police arriving in force. I swerved into the Enterprise car-hire slot before they whizzed past in dynamic chase. The car was nearly returned before it had been rented, the same staff were on shift, and slightly baffled.

  I’d hired it corporate, so the only ID that had been required was my license, which was a fake from my previous employment. I asked them to delete my stolen credit card details and handed over cash instead. I counted the notes I had intended to give to the trafficked girls. There was three grand there. I dropped an extra fifty euros on the counter.

  “You might want to clean the backseat, wee drop of blood. Nothing serious,” I told them, then walked into the Dublin thoroughfare, and jumped on the bus to Belfast.

  Thirteen

  There were guns everywhere when I arrived in Jerusalem. I was used to guns. I was even at ease around automatic weapons, but less so when they were slung over the shoulders of teenagers. Jerusalem was an eye-opener.