Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

“He was the man behind the Asshole Chip?”

“Yeah.” Mike swung his feet up on the desk, smiling like a smug chipmunk. “That’s how he made his first mil. Surprised you didn’t know that.”

The controversial Asshole Chip for cars had been withdrawn from sale not six months previously after being cited in two separate road-rage killings in Britain. A beautifully simple device—little more than a transmitter and receiver—it allowed you to send text messages to any other car thus equipped, using just its plate number. It had originally been piloted as the “D-Mate,” a fun device which was supposedly a safe alternative to mobile phones. But despite its phenomenal popularity, research showed that within its first year, a third of the messages from driver to driver had consisted of the solitary word asshole , so the Asshole Chip it had remained ever since. And then you had the pitched battles on the motorway bottlenecks, the two tyre iron–related deaths—and the ban.

I remember reading somewhere that the D-Mate’s owners had taken a serious bath. Though obviously not as serious as the one Spotty John had taken.

“Sami had long since sold it on,” said Mike, reading my thoughts. “He had to stay one step ahead of the patent police. No doubt he stole it, though. The other guy had the blueprints—and was about to produce them for the court.”

“So how did Sami wind up keeping it then?”

“You’ll appreciate this,” said Mike. “The other guy was beaten to death with a baseball bat in a suspected road-rage attack in Cultra. Ironically, his own car wasn’t fitted with the chip.”

“Could Mr. Zucker have had anything to do with it?” I asked.

He smirked again. “Could Dolly Parton hold a pencil with no hands? Nothing could be proved, though. And as soon as the water was clear, Sami sold on the patent for a mil and a bit and bought his first hotel.”

We sat silently in the cluttered little room for a minute—paperless office my hairy hole, as Mike was wont to say—gazing out through the glass wall at the maze of reporters’ desks in the newsroom.

“We’re dealing with an exceptionally cunning animal here,” said Mike, scratching his beard. “Might be best to go in with some sugar first, rather than the stick.”

He pulled his feet back off the desk and assumed his business face. He’d thought of an in. This is why he was the boss.

“We’ll get him to turn on Billy Hairless,” he said. “Tell him we know it’s a setup. That we’ve a picture of Billy collecting the girl at school. That two other businessmen have been caught in the same scam.”

“And then?”

“We’ll put a hidden wire on you—round the rim of your boxers probably best—and get Sami to incriminate himself on the girl. Then we’ll take it from there—see if we can squeeze the rest of it out of him at a second run. The way it is in this town, most people would be happier to cough to a murder than a sex offence. Even if it is just a matter of a month too early.”

“Angry mobs rarely stop to ask,” I agreed.

“Indeed and they don’t. Listen, I know Zucker slightly. I’ll set up a meeting at the Berkshire Hotel for tomorrow lunchtime. Wear your good suit—and see if you can persuade that poor girl of yours to run an iron over the rest of you.”

* * *

It is not every day you get to call on eighty million dollars, so the next morning I made the supreme effort and bought a new shirt. The suit had been cleaned just two weeks before, for a wedding I had managed to duck out of at the last minute, so it was still crease sharp and minty fresh.

Before I’d left the Standard the previous night, Mike had pointed out to the empty news editor’s desk right outside his door and told me that if I brought this one home, the seat would be mine. Five grand a year more in the bank, and no late nights or mangled bodies.

I have to say I was tempted. The downside was that the extra dough could put ideas into other people’s heads—marital ideas, that is. And I’d been getting enough of that lately, without any extra help. Also, the company would get to own you body and soul. Like they owned Mike. Still, I was flattered with the offer. But I also knew he was warning me not to upset the big money.

Before I left the flat for the meet, I rang Jim Cotton at the cop shop to let him know what I was at. I didn’t want my visit getting back to him from one of the minions at the Berkshire. And it was also possible that Jim might hand me a smoke grenade to lob at Sami.

“Try and get him to turn on Billy Hairless,” said Jim. “Tell him you got it from me that Billy is blackmailing half the chamber using the same girl. If Sami bites at all, we own him—and he’ll give up Billy for Spotty John for sure. ”

Not for the first time I remarked how little difference there is between the policeman’s beat and the newspaperman’s. Except, of course, they get to shoot the people they don’t like while we have to settle for writing about them. On the plus side, hacks like me tend to get quicker and easier access to the great and the good—they don’t feel as threatened. The likes of Cotton, however, wouldn’t have had a prayer of negotiating a sit-down with Zucker without a court order—even if he had warm blood on both sleeves.

“Couple of other things might be worth your while to bounce off him,” said Jim. “We found a lap-dancing cage in an outhouse at the back of the Oxfordian that we think might be connected to Spotty John’s murder.”

“What the hell was one of those doing in the Oxfordian?”

“No idea. But the exact same cage was reported stolen from the Lap It Up Emporium on Ormeau Avenue last week. And you’ll never guess who owns Lap It Up . . .”

“Sam the Man?”

“You got it. And we’ve found a couple of thin bruises on John’s shoulder which the pathologist reckons could have got there when he tried to bust his way out of it.”

“You mean you can lock them?”

“Apparently.”

“Wow. Well, at least I know now what I want for my birthday.”

Cotton laughed appreciatively.

I struck him again while he still found me funny: “You said you’d a couple of things to ask him about. What’s the other?”

“Oh yeah. We checked up on that new Merc John got to drive in for two whole days.”

“What’d it run him?”

“Twenty grand exactly plus his four-year-old Beamer. But here’s the best part: he paid in cash. And the garage still had a batch of the notes.”

“They wouldn’t happen to match the ones Sami took from his personal account last week?”

“Not quite. But they do match a bunch from a bureau de change that we reckon Billy Hairless has a finger in.”

I sighed and shook my head. “The poor dead idiot. I warned him not to get in over his head.”

“Poor dead idiot is right,” said Jim. “Though of course you’re quite wrong. He wasn’t in over his head at all.”

I was momentarily baffled. “What do you mean?”

“The pool,” he said. “It was only four feet deep in the middle. Spotty John was five-four. So whatever else, he was swimming in his own depth.”

* * *

Zucker’s suite at the Berkshire took up the entire second-from-top floor, and his personal office was about as big as my home apartment and the one next door combined.

“Come in,” he said warmly, pointing me toward a bar that looked entirely made of cut glass. “It’s just gone one, so we can break open the gin.”

I demurred just unenthusiastically enough for him to pour me a treble and invite me to slump into a leather couch, as comfortable as a mother’s lap.

Up close, Sami was older and heavier than I would have thought from his TV appearances. His tightly cropped hair was Persil white, and his complexion was very pale, apart from a couple of little brown liver spots on his hands. He’d clearly spent a lot of money on his teeth, though, which were permanently fixed into a shit-eating grin. He sat down on his La-Z-Boy, wiped an imaginary speck of dust off the trouser leg of his five-thousand-dollar suit, and raised his glass. “To happy endings,” he announced.