Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

The mobile on the desk rang. It was said to be secure. But nothing was secure or W amp;K wouldn’t have a business.

…LONDON…

Niemand had a long wait at Heathrow customs. When his turn came, the dark pockmarked man looked at him for a time and said, ‘Central African Republic. Don’t see a lot of these. No. Quite unusual. What’s the population?’

‘Going down all the time,’ Niemand said. ‘Volcanic eruptions, human sacrifice, cannibal feasts.’

The official didn’t smile, kept looking at him while he photocopied the passport page. Then he said, ‘Enjoy your stay in the United Kingdom, sir. Mind the motorised vehicles now.’

Niemand changed a thousand dollars into sterling, rang a hotel, bought a pre-paid mobile phone, and took the underground to Earls Court. He didn’t trust taxis, the drivers cheated you and then things became unpleasant.

It wasn’t until he came up from the tube station that he felt he was in England: a cold late-autumn day, soiled sky, an icy wind probing his collar, chasing litter down filthy Trebovir Road. The hotel was close by. He had stayed there before, on his way back from his uncle’s deathbed in Greece. That was a long time ago and they wouldn’t remember him. Besides, he had a different name now.

The woman at the desk was somewhere out beyond sixty, crimson lips drawn on her face, high Chinese collar hiding chins, slackness.

‘I rang,’ he said. ‘Martin Powell.’

‘Did you? Just the night, dear?’

‘Three.’

‘Forty pounds twenty a night,’ she said. ‘In advance.’

‘I’ll pay cash.’

She smiled. ‘Always happy to accept real money.’

He waited, looking at her, not producing it. He didn’t care about the money but he liked to see how people behaved when off-the-record money was offered. ‘What does that come to then?’

‘One hundred pounds exactly,’ she said. ‘Dear.’

Niemand registered and carried his pilot’s flight bag up the stairs covered with balding carpet. In his room on the third floor, he went through his no-weights exercise routine, twenty minutes. Then he showered in a scratched fibreglass cubicle. The water never went above warm, gurgled, died, spat into life again.

Towelling himself, he thought: A gun, do I need a gun?

He considered it as he dressed, put on clean black jeans, a black T-shirt, the weightless nylon harness that carried his valuables, a black poloneck sweater, his loose-fitting leather jacket. He didn’t know who he’d be dealing with. Guns were for showing. Guns were like offering cash. People understood, you didn’t have to spell it out.

Downstairs, unconsciously hugging the inside wall like a blind man, around the corner to a pub, a mock-old place with fake timbers, hungover staff, just a dozen or so customers, one sad man with a pencil moustache drinking a pink liquid, possibly a Pimms, the last Pimms drinker. At a corner table, he ate a slice of pizza, tasteless, just fodder, rubber fodder, he was hungry, couldn’t eat much on planes, someone sitting so close to him he could hear their teeth crush the food, the drain sound of swallowing. When he was finished, he moved his plate to an empty table. He couldn’t bear smeared plates, dirty cutlery, mouth prints on glasses, the cold, congealing bits of leftover food.

From under his sweater he brought out his nylon wallet and found the number. He looked around, dialled.

‘Kennex Import. How may I help you?’

‘Michael Hollis, please,’ Niemand said in his Yorkshire accent. He had always been able to mimic accents. He heard them in his head like music, the stresses and timbres, the inflections.

‘Who may I say is calling?’

‘Tell him it’s in connection with a package.’

‘Please hold.’

Not for long.

‘Hollis.’ The faint German accent.

Niemand waited a few seconds. ‘I have a package from Johannesburg.’

‘Oh yes. The package.’

Two women came in, girls, shrieking, spiky hair, faces violated by rings, full of push and bump and finger-point.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it for less than fifty thousand, US.’

A pause. A sniff, an intake, just audible.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’

A pause, the sniff, another sound, a click-click. ‘I’m not sure we can do that. Can I call you back? Give me your number.’

‘No,’ said Niemand. ‘I’ll give you an hour to decide. Then you can say yes or no. If it’s no, the package goes somewhere else. I’ll ring.

Goodbye.’

Niemand went for a walk as far as Kensington Gardens, sat on a bench and watched the people. He had been there before, on his second visit to London. He was supposed to be on his way to Papua New Guinea to fight headhunters, that came to nothing, some political fuck-up. For ten days, he’d been stuck in a hotel near Heathrow with half a dozen other mercenaries-the stupid, the brain-dead, and the merely kill-crazy. Every day, early, he’d take the underground somewhere and run back, long routes plotted with a map. He got to know London as far away as Hampstead and Wimbledon and Bermondsey. Then they were paid off and given plane tickets home.

He always felt strange in England, hearing English everywhere. His father had hated the English, rooinekke , anyone who spoke English, Jews in particular, said it was in his blood: Niemands had fought against the British in the Boer War, been put in concentration camps, sent to Ceylon, a koelie eiland , a coolie island. But then his father had also hated Greeks and Portuguese, called them see kaffirs, sea-kaffirs. For Greeks he reserved a special loathing, having married a Greek girl and lost her because of his drinking and violence. When Niemand and his mother came back from five years on Crete, he found that his father came home drunk from the mine every day, drove the loose old Chev V8 into the dirt yard at speed, stopped in a dust cloud inches from the tacked-on verandah. One day, he braked too late, took out a pillar, half the roof fell on the Chev. He just stayed where he was, opened the bottle of cheap brandy. Niemand found him when he came home, carried him to bed, surprised at how light he was, just bones and sinew.

Niemand looked at his watch. Five minutes to go. Two young women behind three-wheeled pushchairs came from opposite directions, saw each other, cried out. Stopping abreast, they walked around and inspected each other’s cargoes beneath the plastic covers, made delighted scrunched-up faces.

He dialled.

‘Kennex Import. How may I help you?’

‘Mr Hollis. About the package.’

No further questions.

Niemand watched the mothers talking, hands moving, talking babies, faces alive with interest.

‘Ah, the package.’ Hollis. ‘Yes, I’m having trouble getting authorisation for the deal you suggest without seeing that the goods are as described.’

‘No,’ Niemand said. ‘You give me the money. In cash. I give you the package.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘I think it is. Yes or no.’

‘We have to see the goods. You can understand that.’

Niemand didn’t like the way this was going. He didn’t have contingency plans. ‘Now the price is sixty thousand,’ he said. ‘Inflation.’

‘I’m sure we can agree on price when we know what we’re getting. I’ll give you an address to bring the package to. You do that soonest, say in an hour, thereabouts, soonest. Then we look at it, we authorise payment. How’s that?’

‘Forget it. You’re not the only buyer. How’s that?’

‘That’s quite persuasive. Can you give me time to discuss this with my colleagues? I’ll recommend that we do it your way. I’m sure they’ll agree. Call me at ten tomorrow morning?’