Quintin Jardine: A Rush of Blood

Impassive, McGuire nodded.

‘Good. As always, Paula knew what to do. Next day, Tommy was in his own office, when two fucking monsters came in unannounced, having walked right through the two bodyguards outside. They showed him warrant cards, which identified them as police. One of them didn’t say anything, but the other, a guy with black curly hair and a wicked smile, told Tommy that he’d just done something incredibly fucking stupid by threatening his uncle, and that any repetition would have the most severe consequences. Beppe never had any more trouble; in fact he never heard a word from Zaliukas again.’

‘And where did you hear all this?’ the DCS asked quietly. ‘Has our pal Neil been indiscreet around the dinner table?’

‘Hah!’ Skinner laughed out loud. ‘You should know him better than that. No, I heard the tale from none other than Tommy Zale himself. Priceless: the silly bugger thought I’d sent you to warn him off! He called me within the hour and asked if he could come and see me. He began by apologising for what he said was a complete misunderstanding, and for not making it clear to Mr Viareggio that his visit was simply to see whether they might have had any business interests in common. At first I hadn’t the faintest fucking idea what he was talking about, but I let him go on, and kept my face straight as I pieced it together. When he was done, I gave him the glare and asked him if he’d taken the warning to heart. He assured me that he had, but that it hadn’t been necessary.’

‘And yet you never said anything to us? Or even thought about it?’

‘Oh, but I thought about it, boyo,’ the chief constable told him. ‘I almost had the pair of you on the carpet for using the job to sort out a family matter. But when I considered it some more, I decided that if you had come to me and reported an attempted extortion, as you should have, I’d have told you to do exactly what you did. I knew who you two were at that point, but I didn’t know a lot about you. After that, I made it my business to find out, and by Christ, look where both of you are now.’

McGuire smiled. ‘In that case it’s probably just as well that McIlhenney talked me out of beating the shite out of him and throwing him in the dock.’

‘That was a good career move on his part, I’ll concede. . and on Tomas Zaliukas’s, when he threw himself on my mercy. He was desperate to convince me that he was entirely legit, and by that time, apart from the odd wee aberration like his silly threat to Beppe, I reckon he probably was. I’m quite certain that nothing illegal ever happened in any of his pubs, not with his knowledge at any rate. He went on to acquire a dozen pub and club licences across Edinburgh, and a few more in the counties around it. They were all spotless.’

‘No drugs going through any of them?’ asked Mackie, his tone sceptical. ‘Not even the discos?’

‘Nope. There were warning signs in all the toilets of his clubs, and the managers all had firm instructions; anyone caught smoking hash or popping pills on the premises was chucked out and barred. Anyone caught snorting coke or injecting was detained and handed over to us. It was the same with anyone pushing any sort of drug, but they were usually carrying a few lumps and bumps by the time we arrived.’

‘Those principles still apply,’ McGuire confirmed. ‘The notices are still there in the bogs in Indigo. . and in any of Zaliukas’s pubs that I’ve been in. He welcomes cops in all of them, and because we go there, the places are clean in every respect, and there’s no chance of any of the new young hooligans going into any of them looking for protection money. As for Paula, I don’t think she knows that the place is owned by the same guy who scared her dad, if she even remembers that incident. But come to think of it, I’ve never seen Zaliukas in any of his own places.’

‘You don’t, very often,’ said Skinner. ‘Tomas has kept a low profile for some years now.’ He glanced at his deputy. ‘As for the drugs thing, Brian, not even in the wildness of his youth was he ever into that. Tony Manson wouldn’t have allowed it. He was a funny bugger, that one. I know that he dealt drugs himself; it was one of many things we couldn’t pin on him. But I always had the feeling that he did it so that he could control it in his territory. He didn’t leech on the users either; back then it was reckoned that Edinburgh had the cheapest smack in Scotland.’

‘Are you saying he was benevolent?’ Steele murmured.

‘I’m saying that if there can be such a thing as a responsible drug baron, he was. He realised that if he didn’t feed the demand, someone else would, somebody who didn’t care at all about the addicts, only about the money that could be screwed out of them. Manson didn’t really approve of the business, and he reasoned that made him the best person to run it. This strange morality of his led him to make sure that none of his closest associates, the people he liked most, were involved in it in any way. Lennie Plenderleith never was, and neither were Tommy Zale and his Lithuanian crew. He ran quality control himself, he subcontracted distribution to other people. They hired the dealers, and Tony had Dougie Terry. . Remember him? The guy we called the Comedian?. . keep an eye on them to make sure no liberties were being taken. If we’d been running the trade we couldn’t have done it better than he did. When Tomas started to break into the pub business, it was easy for him to make his places drug-free from the start, because Manson spread the word that they were off limits. By the time Tony died, Zaliukas was strong enough to make it stick himself.’

‘You sound,’ said Mackie, ‘that you wish Manson was still around.’

‘I do, in a way. Since he met his end, the business he ran with discipline and with the understanding that it’s bad practice to bleed your customers dry has been taken over by people with no morality at all. Fortunately they tend to be stupid and we knock them down pretty quick, but when we do that, in the process we create a business opportunity, and the whole cycle begins again. It’s like that bloke who had to push a rock uphill for all eternity.’

‘Sisyphus,’ Mackenzie volunteered.

‘You can get injections for that,’ the chief constable retorted. He looked up at the wall clock. ‘You people should be getting on with your day.’ As his colleagues stood, he added, ‘My highlight, incidentally, will be lunch in Oloroso with my daughter, to celebrate her appointment as a partner in Curle Anthony and Jarvis. She called me last night to give me the good news. The even better news is that she’s paying.’

‘Congratulations,’ Steele exclaimed.

‘Thanks, Mags, but it was all her own work.’ As the others headed for the door, he put a hand on McGuire’s shoulder. ‘Stay for a minute, Mario, please. Sit yourself back down.’

When Skinner resumed his seat he saw that the head of CID was smiling. ‘What’s tickling you?’ he asked.

‘I’m thinking of what you said about Papa Viareggio. You were wrong. He wouldn’t have done anything to Zale himself; he’d have done what Paula did, more or less. She came to me and asked me to see to the guy as I thought best. He, though, he’d have called somebody else, and Zale would have had that hand with the tattoo nailed to a tree, maybe about ten feet off the ground. I remember when I was about eight or nine, this very old man came over from Italy for a visit. He was Papa’s uncle, Patrizio, and he was fucking ferocious. He wasn’t all that big, but he never smiled, and there was something about his eyes that chilled me; there was no twinkle in them, all darkness. He was, and remains, the scariest man I’ve ever met, and from what Papa told me when I was a bit older, my great-grandfather was just like him.’