Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

The judge's words faded. A week before, Joey Cann would have nodded sympathetically and would have understood. But a long week had gone by.

'So, what happened?' Joey persisted. 'What turned you?'

The judge looked up at him, and his dulled eyes blinked under the force of the ceiling light. 'There were two offers put on the table. The offer to be killed,

… Eighteen men came to the house this morning, at first light, with lorries, cement mixers, blocks, timber. They worked all day, until it was dark, and they will be here again in a few hours. At lunchtime the Mercedes came. In the afternoon the catalogues were delivered to us. We will have the bathroom of our choice with a special shower for Jasmina, the kitchen that will suit her and a refrigerator freezer and the decoration for the rooms. What do you say '

Joey, the week-old veteran of Sarajevo, said with spite, 'I say that the whole city will know you had a price.'

' It is Sarajevo, Joey, the city will applaud me, a fool has become sensible… In the evening a functionary came from the pensions department of the Ministry of Finance. He gave me back the document I had given nine years before to Ismet Mujic as part payment for Jasmina going to the Vrbanja bridge. With the document was an account statement, the scheme was paid up. They own me, they have bought me, and the world can know it. Don't you have a price, Joey?'

The question hurt, cut deep, and he hesitated. She was behind him, circling them. The wheels crunched on the fallen plaster and squealed. He could not see her face. He had bought her flowers. Anyone who'd cared to look from the pavements, or from their cars on the streets of this shit city, would have seen that a girl in a wheelchair carried his flowers. The question was under his guard.

' I don't know – if it was about someone I loved… '

' I did not think I had a price. I urge you, pray to your God that you never have to drink from the devil's cup.' The judge looked into Joey's eyes and asked simply,' Who would have looked after her?'

'Papa, enough of talking,' she snapped. 'He has no sympathy for what you say – look at him. He involved us, Papa. You should not justify yourself.' She came round the table, braked the chair between her father and Joey.

' If it had been about someone I loved I might have had a price. I don't stand in judgement. I hope I don't have that conceit.'

'Will you leave? You upset my father.' He saw the anger blaze in her eyes, and the colour flush her cheeks.

'The withdrawal of the authorization for intrusive surveillance, Joey, does that make it hard for you?'

The judge's thin voice seeped from behind her back.

'If I wore the uniform, had the mentality of the uniform, it would be impossible for me to continue.'

'Without the uniform, what is the action of a driven man? What do you do, |oey?'

Because he had come into their lives, the dignity was gone from them. He wondered if, when he was gone, they would curse him. The love that gave flowers was finished. He stood tall over them, and they waited on his answer. He did not know himself, and nobody who knew him would have recognized Joey Cann

He said, with savagery, 'I go to the end of the road, follow where I am led. I think it finishes tomorrow.

Tomorrow you will know whether you were bought too cheaply, whether you surrendered your pride too quickly… Look and listen.'

He went out of the room and into the night. They might curse him, they might weep in each other's arms or forget he had ever come into their lives. In a few hours it would be finished. He walked down the hill, left the building site and the Mercedes behind him, with his decency.

She passed the earphones to Salko, who began to scribble on a sheet of paper. When the call was finished, he gave the sheet to Frank. Frank wrote the translation, and palmed it to Maggie.

'Sorry about that, boys, a little bit of panic there for a moment,' she chimed. 'Turkish isn't one of my talents… If I was clever, which I'm certainly not at this time of a God-forsaken night, I'd rather fancy a limerick coming on. It's getting quite multinational, don't you think? Line one: "There once was a Russkie, an Eyetie, and a Turk." Then we've "perk", "kirk",

"dirk" and " l u r k "… I'm too bloody tired. You know anything about Turks, Frank?' She eased back in her chair against him, liked the touch of him.

'Mainstream heroin trafficking.'

She grinned. 'You know what I think?'

'Unveil yourself to me, Miss Bolton.' Frank smirked at her.

She pushed him away, but she liked his sauce. It was cold as death in the room. There was a single small light, the bulb heavily shaded, in the room, on the floor. She clamped the earphones back on her head.

'Mister thinks this is going to be his meeting – I think he's in serious danger of diving into the pond and finding he's out of his depth.'

'Why would he do that?' Ivor Jowett asked into the phone. His wife, her face frozen in fury, tossed beside him. He listened, thanked the caller, and rang off. He switched off the bedside light, and lay on his back in the darkness.

Ivor Jowett was the drugs liaison officer on a posting from the Custom House to the British embassy in Ankara. The Turkey secondment was a good one. At the embassy, Sehit Ersan Cad. 46/A Cankaya, he was the early-warning siren for the premier cases of heroin importation into the United Kingdom. As an ambitious investigation beaver, with the information fed him by the polisi in the cities and the jandarmas in the countryside, he would be noticed and fast-tracked to promotion. The stuff poured through the refineries and flowed out over the Bosphorus and across Europe to the British Channel and North Sea ports. Without the contacts, the phone calls at dead of night, Ivor Jowetl would have wallowed uselessly. The pity of it was that the calls came, a good half of them, into his apartment in the night hours, not to his office in the working day. Newspaper clippings were sent him each week hy the public affairs section of the Custom House, most times the credit for a seizure at Harwich docks, or Felixstowe or Dover, or at the port of Southampton was given to the 'dedication and persistence and thoroughness' of the uniformed staff; the figures soared a million pounds' worth, street value, of intercepted heroin was commonplace, ten million pounds was not rare. Ivor Jowett, late of the Sierra Quebec Juliet team, was a s t a r… His wife rolled over and cradled hcrself in his arm. She was Gloria, formerly ol Sierra Quebec Roger, it was said at the Custom House that internal marriages were the only ones that had a chance.

'Do you want a coffee?'

'Wouldn't mind.'

The principal strain on the marriages was the refusal of officers to confide in wives who were not in the family. He could tell Gloria. She did the secretarial in the embassy office, but still grumbled and complained of under-employment. What would he tell her, when she brought back the mugs of coffee?

He was Fuat Selcuk, believed to be forty eight years old. He was from a village on the Aras river near to Erzurum. His territory stretched along the old Soviet border, now Georgia and Armenia, from Artvin and Kars in the north to Mount Ararat and Mount Tendurek in the south. It was where he had his refineries, where he employed the best young chemists from the universities. The product in which he dealt, raw opium, originated in the poppyfields of Afghanistan. In sacks, lashed to the backs of mules, the cargo was brought north from the collection point at Taloqan then was ferried across the Pjandz river, where the escort of machine-guns was changed, then taken overland across Tajikistan, and shipped over the width of the Caspian Sea, unloaded at the Azerbaijani harbour of Sumqayit, then moved on to the border posts close to Igdir and Ardahan. There Fuat Selcuk waited for the cargo's arrival and paid for it with cash, dollars. The money, cut and cut and cut – as the cargo would be – returned on the trail and paid off the lorry drivers, the middlemen, the ferry crews, the border guards, the machine-gunners, the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, and the farmers who grew the crops of poppies in their fields. He was never cheated. The cargo was never stolen en route, sacks never fell from the backs of the lorries or the mules. Hiss arm reached from western Turkey all the way back to the hill fields of Afghanistan. To cheat him would have been the same as tying a heavy stone around the neck and wading out into the Pjandz river. Neither was he cheated in the refineries by his chemists, nor as the lorries rolled off the Bosphorus ferries for the long drive north across Europe and the ultimate destinations in Holland, Germany, France, or Green Lanes in north London. In his younger days, when his reputation as a businessman of honour was not yet confirmed, Fuat Selcuk's speciality was to slice off a man's testicles and stifle the screaming by placing them in the victim's mouth, then stapling his lips together so that they could not be spat out. He was also a man of charity: he had built hospitals and schools, and he paid for the repair of mosques.