Winner Kills All

by RJ Bailey

  ‘Mainly for smugglers,’ he said warily. ‘Mules, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Especially if police not getting a cut.’

  ‘The police are in on it?’

  Kadek gave a little bark of a laugh. ‘Always. Except maybe where army in control. Army specialises in cannabis. Police, they control ecstasy and ketamine. The people at Bacang, they sell yaa baa and putauw. Very bad. Don’t eat or drink anything inside please, Ibu.’

  I knew what yaa baa was, a catch-all term for various strains of methamphetamine, most of it made in Myanmar or the Thai jungles and shipped across Asia. It was consumed like Red Bull is in Europe – something to give taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, bar workers, farmers and students a lift. But, unlike Red Bull, it was highly addictive and unpredictable. ‘What’s putauw?’

  Kadek laughed again, but this time it was an empty, mirthless sound. ‘Something that was once heroin. Street grade.’ He looked across at me and repeated: ‘Very bad. Why you want to go?’

  ‘I was told to meet someone there.’

  He grunted at that and we rode on in silence into an area that was dense with bars, clubs, restaurants and a night market. There were people twirling flaming batons on one corner – which looked like a public-safety menace to me, what with all the bamboo around – a few hollow-cheeked, mostly dreadlocked buskers who looked more like scarecrows than musicians and clumps of drunken Western travellers swaying along what passed for a pavement.

  Eventually, we pulled into what appeared to be a parking lot, one end of which was colonised by a dozen food stalls, the air dense with their smoke. I was glad I had eaten. Even in the car, the food smelled delicious. Before I got out, I said: ‘You’ll be here?’

  ‘Just over there, Ibu. You be careful.’

  ‘I will.’

  The stalls were arranged in a shallow semi-circle, with a single break in the middle. I stood still for a moment, eyes stinging from the smoke, and watched several furtive figures slip through the gap, as if it were a portal to another world.

  As I walked across to enter whatever lay behind the car park, I noticed a familiar face – or, at least, a familiar arse – at one of the stalls, scoffing a giant bowl of gado-gado.

  The cop from the Blue Turtle.

  I strode across the pockmarked asphalt as if I belonged there, and straight through between the two lines of stalls, ignoring a half-hearted soft sell from one of the vendors.

  I hesitated to let my eyes adjust.

  Above me was a stretched tarpaulin, which cut out some of the light from the food stalls’ gas and battery lamps. Ahead was a bamboo fence with a single wide door in its centre. It swung open and a tall Westerner, shirt undone to his navel, came by, studiously avoiding eye contact, his cheeks burning with shame or excitement, it was difficult to tell. The door clacked back into place.

  Once my night vision had improved a little, I stepped through the opening. The smell that hit me was the olfactory equivalent of sweet, sour and nauseous.

  Incense, of course, food, sewers and the musk of too many bodies in close proximity.

  A path, squelchy underfoot, led between shanty shacks made of wood and corrugated iron, every one draped with a crown of electrical cables. Each doorway had a different-coloured lantern hanging from it. Women, mostly, sat around on chairs and stools, smoking, uninterested in me. Or anything. The majority were mere carcasses, the meat on them burned away by whatever life they lived and chemicals they took.

  I continued to walk down, following the row of torches that marked the route between the shacks. I passed a hut full of hollow-eyed young boys, another of what I would later discover were called benchongs; transvestites or transgenders or whatever the current nomenclature was. One of them smiled at me from under a bright red wig and raised a beer bottle. My return smile might have been somewhat strained. I could see why Kadek didn’t like this place.

  It began to rain, warm but heavy-ish. Some of the prostitutes shifted back under shelter. There came a sound like the shake of a million tiny tambourines, and from under the huts came an army of cockroaches, which took to the air and flew at me.

  I began to bat them away and heard a few barks of laughter. As they hit my skin, I felt the burn of regurgitated nasi goreng.

  ‘Ibu, Ibu, this way.’

  I peered through the shifting screen of insect bodies and saw, some metres ahead, the silhouette of Aja. I stepped forward, but as soon as I moved she spun around and trotted off.

  As I followed, the cockroaches thinned. Then, someone turned off the rain tap. As one, the cloud of clacking insects fell to the ground, as if their flying batteries had run out, and they scuttled off back under the shanties.

  After the last of the flaming torches, the shacks gave way to a small wooded area, the trees spiralled with fairy lights to mark the new path. Unseen birds chirped from above, with the constant, inevitable rhythm of tree frogs underneath.

  It was like going from a Grimms’ fairy tale to an Enid Blyton world.

  Following the strings of electric lights took me through the woods to a clearing, where an ancient, twisted banyan tree held pride of place. Next to it was a shrine, illuminated by candles and the glowing fireflies of incense sticks, with a statue of Ganesh, the elephant god, sitting on top. A young woman was on her knees before it, pressing rice offerings into a bowl. At the far end of the space, behind the tree, were the lights of another ‘village’, but these houses looked more substantial, less international refugee camp.

  Aja was standing directly in front of me, hands on hips.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, my insides knotting at the thought of what she was about to tell me.

  ‘Hello, Sam Wylde.’

  It took a second for me to realise that her lips hadn’t moved and that this was not an act of ventriloquism, but another person.

  She stepped aside. There was a man sitting at a table in the shadow of the banyan tree. There was the flare of a match as he lit a cigarette, and in the brief light I saw a face I recognised and my stomach unravelled itself, ready to vomit up its contents.

  I knew him.

  Thought he was dead. Hoped he was dead.

  In that moment, all the optimism in me drained away, like petrol poured on sand.

  It was Bojan.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I had fought for my life with this man. He was a bodyguard of sorts, although closer to a mercenary. He had been instrumental in a plot to convince me I was working for MI5 when, in fact, I had been duped by an organisation trying to ruin the business of one of my clients. The last time I had seen him, he was lying in a pool of blood, a knife sticking out of his torso.

  So there was only one way to greet him.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I asked between clenched teeth. ‘And you . . .’ I pointed to Aja, but she sidled off like one of the roaches before I could fully form my insult. Any compassion I had for her drained away in an instant.

  She had set me up.

  ‘Relax, it’s not her fault. Just doing as she is told, like the pretty kupu kupu malam she is. It means “night butterfly”. So much prettier than whore, don’t you think? Sit down, Sam Wylde, we have to talk. Cigarette?’ His voice was raspier than I recalled, like a cat coughing up a fur ball. Maybe it was all the fags.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said, remembering Kadek’s warning about eating and drinking. It wasn’t difficult to adulterate a smoke. Not somewhere they apparently sold shit-grade heroin.

  I walked over, pulled out a chair and sat. The girl at the shrine stood, bowed and walked off to the second village.

  ‘It’s more upmarket in there,’ growled Bojan as I watched her go. ‘Dick less likely to fall off. Back where you walked through, you get a blowjob for three dollars, sex for five. Back here, oh, twenty, thirty, maybe even a hundred for something special.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I remember your tits. We could probably get even more for you.’ Then he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘Doh. I forgot. You’ve had a
kid, haven’t you? How could I forget? Probably a bit . . . what’s the word?’ He frowned. ‘Slack.’ He pointed to my crotch. ‘They are very fussy about that when paying top dollar. They want tight pussy.’

  I almost laughed. This was playground stuff. He was sparring. Although, I did always hate those women who said they elected for a caesarean so they could keep their husbands happy. I was always there to tell them it didn’t turn into the Dartford Tunnel. Besides, they could always get a husband with a decent-sized dick.

  ‘That’s why we’re here? To discuss tightening my fanny?’

  ‘Come to think of it, I reckon some of the girls have had that done. I could probably get you a rate.’

  I bit my tongue, stifling half a dozen smart-arse answers.

  I could see him properly now. Still bullet-headed and hairless, but he was thinner than when I had fought him for my life, his pale skin stretched taut over tendons and bones.

  Bojan was the Serbian thug who haunted my dreams. The one who had tried to humiliate me once and kill me a second time. The knife meant for me had gone into him instead. ‘I thought you were dead, Bojan.’

  ‘Me and you both.’ He held up his thumb and forefinger a few millimetres apart. ‘Came this close.’

  ‘The butler wasn’t so lucky.’

  A shrug of his broad shoulders. I made a mental note not to underestimate him. After all, as an apparently mortally wounded man, he had killed the Russian oligarch’s butler watching over him and made his escape.

  Thinner and croakier didn’t mean he was any less dangerous.

  ‘So it goes,’ he rasped. ‘So it goes.’

  ‘Is this a coincidence? That you should be here in Bali?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I smell a rat.’

  He laughed at that, smoke streaming from his nostrils as he did so. ‘Is that me you are talking about?’

  ‘Oh, I can do better than “rat” for you, Bojan.’

  ‘Still got that big mouth, eh? Let’s see what you have to say about this.’ He extracted something from the pocket of his jeans and put it on the table between us. I stared at it for a while before it began to dawn on me what the object was.

  And then my insides turned to ice.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Pick it up. Check it’s real. I had to break the code, so it’ll come straight on. I mean, she blocked the number when it was taken, but all the contents are still there.’

  I lifted it off the table, flipped open the case and pressed the button. The screen lit up. I recognised the picture that appeared, of course.

  It was me.

  First day in Iraq, in my army medic gear with Freddie standing next to me. Young and eager, not yet beaten down or bloodied. A whole series of worlds ago.

  I couldn’t quite compute what he was doing with it. ‘How did you get this? Did you buy it?’

  ‘Ha. Buy it? No. I took it. The moped thieves? My lads.’

  Another young lady appeared to make an offering. ‘The fuckin’ Balinese,’ said Bojan, irritably. ‘They make an offering on everything—’

  I was in no mood for a change of subject. Particularly not from a man like Bojan. ‘You mugged Freddie?’

  ‘Well, technically, I had her mugged. But yes. How is she?’

  ‘Banged up.’

  ‘Good, job done. Although my beef isn’t with her.’

  ‘How did you track her down? Us down.’ It was difficult to keep my voice level. The hysteria was bubbling up like lava from that nearby volcano.

  He puffed on his cigarette for a few moments, debating whether to tell me. ‘I wasn’t really looking that hard for you,’ he said at last. ‘I had to get better. Back in the game. But I knew the time would come when we would meet again. Given the circles we move in. And it did. It was Oktane. You hired Oktane. Word got out. That I couldn’t ignore. You were virtually on my doorstep. And by then, I was pretty much back to fighting fit. And so it wasn’t so very hard to find you at all.’

  ‘But we never even met him. Oktane.’

  He flicked his cigarette away into the undergrowth and lit a second. ‘Here’s the thing. And I bet you don’t know this. You heard of the comic strip The Phantom?’

  I shook my head. I get shaky beyond Batman.

  ‘OK, big when I was growing up. Superman, Spider-Man, very hard to get in my hometown. But The Phantom was everywhere. So, he’s a guy who lives in the jungle. The Ghost Who Walks. Like Tarzan, but with a mask and a gun. And the Phantom has been going for like, dozens of years, decades. How come he never ages? There’s the trick. There is more than one Phantom. When one gets too old for the masked crime-fighter shit, he trains up a new guy to take over. So, the current one is like the twentieth Phantom.’

  Help, I’m trapped in Forbidden Planet with a comic nerd. ‘I don’t see—’

  ‘Oktane is a bit like that. There are several Oktanes.’ He laughed. ‘It’s a franchise.’

  ‘Jesus.’ I still remembered when Jess was small, feeling more than a little cheated when I went to a party and there was a different Mr Marvel children’s entertainer than the one I had hired. Turned out there was an army of Mr Marvels, all over the country like a rash. It was the party equivalent of a fast-food business, serving kids the same puppet shows, magic and slapstick routine. Only, the server changed. And now, apparently hit men were in on the act. Maybe they were on zero-hour contracts, too.

  But the Oktane model was probably closer to the Chechen one. If you can prove you are ruthless and brutal enough, anyone, anywhere in the world, can buy the rights to designate themselves a branch of the Chechen Mafia. Just never, ever do it unofficially, because those guys tend to send cease-and-desist torturers rather than a solicitor’s letter.

  ‘And you know one of the Oktanes?’ I asked.

  ‘I do. Funny, eh? Small world. He told me about this job that was out for tender and I recognised you from the job description. Two women doing something ballsy but stupid? That’s you and your pal Freddie, Sam Wylde. Ballsy but stupid.’

  ‘Hey, that’s one therapy session saved, thanks. I still don’t understand—’

  ‘You know how much crap is on one of those things once you unlock it?’ he asked, pointing at Freddie’s phone. ‘And how did I unlock it? Piece of piss, as you say. Most people who have been in the army use some variation of their old service number as their password. I bet you do.’

  I kept my face idling in neutral. I did. Because it is one number drummed into you so hard, you’ll never forget it no matter how senile you become.

  ‘Freddie certainly did,’ he continued. ‘So, I got all your texts, emails, exchanges. Before she set up her new phone and automatically blocked us, we downloaded all existing WhatsApp chats. I knew about the wedding—’

  A weak little light went on in my head. ‘Did you throw a bottle over the wall at me the other day? In a hotel in Ubud?’

  He smirked. ‘Not personally. It was just to keep you on your toes,’ he conceded. ‘I have copies of the photos of your daughter from here in Bali, the ones you have been hawking around. I know as much about what happened to Jess as you. Maybe more.’

  I came half out of my seat, reached over and grabbed his T-shirt, but his hand locked around my wrist. I remembered just how fucking strong he was as he squeezed. ‘Don’t be even more dumb. You think I didn’t arrange insurance?’

  I followed his gaze. Standing under one of the trees with the fairy lights was the fat cop, with a uniformed policeman next to him.

  An armed uniformed policeman.

  I knew that because he had drawn his weapon. I let go of Bojan and he released my wrist. I sat back in the rickety chair.

  Any trace of affability disappeared from his voice when he spoke. ‘I once said that if you didn’t do as you were told, I’d take your daughter. I still intend to. You cost me my spleen, half my stomach and a kidney. I’m going to rip your heart out, woman. She’d be worth a lot to me, somewhere like th
is. F-O-T-B.’

  I didn’t want to ask what that meant. My imagination filled it in anyway.

  ‘I brought you here because this is the kind of place she’ll end up. Not here, exactly. But there are thousands of versions of Bacang around the world. At first, she’ll just have a few select clients. Then, once the novelty has worn off, she’ll end up back there, in the good place. But once her cunt and ass are worn out, she’ll be shunted there, into that shithole you just walked through. By the time she’s eighteen, she’ll be a husk of a junkie.’

  I realised I wasn’t breathing and my vision was swimming. Sparring, I reminded myself. Just words.

  ‘And you, you’ll be in that very special hell reserved for people who know their children are suffering and they can do fuck all about it. And for those who want to kill the people who have done them harm, but can’t. The Suffer Club, you might call it.’

  I put my fingers round his throat and squeezed, digging them in until I found the artery, pressing, pressing . . .

  I blinked.

  I hadn’t moved. He was still talking.

  ‘But right now, like you, I don’t know where she is. That doesn’t mean I don’t intend to find her. Just like you do. And if you make it to her first, then, the best person has won. But if I get to her first . . .’ Bojan coughed, interrupting his flow. ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.’ And he laughed.

  That was a mistake.

  It wasn’t much of a punch, but it connected and he reeled back in his chair. I heard a shout from the cops, but Bojan put his hand up. ‘OK . . . it’s OK. She gets that one for free.’

  I wanted to shake my hand. My knuckles were stinging. He had a red mark on his cheek. I would imagine he wanted to touch that. Neither of us moved. ‘You fuckin’ monster.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He leaned in over the table and hissed. ‘I’m the fuckin’ monster who is going to find your precious Jess and feed her to the wolves. And you, Sam Wylde, made me.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  My husband Paul used to tell a story about his colleague, William, who left the services and intended to become a Close Protection Officer. Instead, his father, who reviewed for Gramophone magazine, got him a gig as a minder for a renowned classical violinist, who also happened to be blind.