Bad Dreams (7 page)

Clive still thought the vegetable talk was fucking stupid. He was supposed to be a wholesale produce importer, supplying his own chain of fashionably overpriced health food shops. Through design-oriented marketing, he had ridden the Green wave and successfully negated the duffel-coated hippie image of health foods to target the high disposable income of yuppies in high-stress jobs who would follow any dietary plan as long as it was expensive and minimal. The food business was even quite lucrative, but actually his real trade was drugs. The code-names just made Mink feel like he was in a spy film. It was a typical dopehead way of justifying habitual paranoia. It also suggested he thought he was just playing a game, and Clive was serious about what he did for a living. He was not thirty yet, but already he had been in the Business twice as long as most of the people he worked with. It was all about being careful.

But Mink’s message was good news. Clive could now go down to the Hackney wholefood store and pick up the heroin his people were waiting for. New drug-of-the-month crazes like Ecstasy and crack might come along, and Clive was conscious that he had to keep such items in stock, while cocaine was capturing a more exclusive portion of the market but heroin was the white bread of the Business. There was always a market for the old staple diet of junkies. After a night in the space behind his airing cupboard, the gear would go to the Sergeant Major and be repackaged for his men in the marketplace. And he would be able to meet Mr Skinner’s standing order.

Mr Skinner would be very pleased. Clive sometimes wondered what the man was up to. Obviously, the skag he bought wound up in someone or other’s arm. His version was that heroin was much more convenient than cash. He was right there. Surely, the Games Master wasn’t stuck on the H himself. He was not anyone’s idea of normal, but he was not stupid. Clive was well aware of his position in the Business, at precisely that cusp where men in smart suits with career structures deal with deadbeats in tom jeans with minimal life expectancies. Mr Skinner was higher up the pyramid. When you got to where he was, it stopped being Business and started getting Political. Right now, it was down to Clive to make himself indispensible.

Clive started doing sums on his expensive pocket calculator. He had an upper second in business studies from the University of East Anglia. Most of the people he had known up there were working in the City, for the media or unemployed these days. Several of them were customers, although they saw the Sergeant Major’s lads rather than him. He liked to think he was making more money and paying less tax than any of them. His calculator played the first eight notes of ‘Money Makes the World Go Around’. That always gave him a giggle.

He was proud of the fact that he had three times voted for the best government the country had had in his lifetime. There was a picture of him shaking hands with Margaret Thatcher at a Young Entrepreneur of the Year dinner on his desk next to his Sinclair micro. He really admired her for the way she had opened up the economy to individual enterprise. He was a practised and popular after dinner speaker at local affairs, and his favourite address was entitled ‘The Strength of a Nation Lies in its Human Resources’. For him, the Business was a business, not an amusement or an adjunct to a personal need. The drug trade was a consumer-led market, and he had got into it at the right time, meeting an increased demand and offering a better service than his competitors. The ’80s had been a growth period, but he knew that bull markets always eventually swelled and burst. He could foresee the point when he would get out of drugs – at the right time, of course – and step up the pyramid.

Although the very nature of the Business brought him into contact with a load of moaning minnies and smackhead losers, he had started to employ only men who had proved themselves possessed of a decent amount of backbone. The Sergeant Major had been in Northern Ireland for a couple of years before they sent him to Pentonville, and he had brought some good new lads into the operation. One or two of the carriers had served in the Falklands. Clive did not employ users, and the Sergeant Major had standing orders to pay off with broken bones any of his lads caught with their fingers in the supply. Clive wanted long-term people who could be useful when he branched out.

Now, Clive telephoned the Sergeant Major. He would have been up since dawn, handling a couple of little things. He picked up the phone at the fourth ring.

‘Sergeant Major.’

‘Mr Broome?’

‘How did things go?’

‘Very nicely, sir. I’ve been to the bank, and I talked to the man you wanted seen to. There won’t be any more trouble in Deptford, I don’t think.’

Clive imagined the crack of fingerbones.

‘That’s excellent. I’d appreciate it if you’d drop by later.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Yes, we have another disposal job to do. A lot like the last one.

No trouble at all.’

‘Fine, sir.’

‘Right. See you later. Take care.’

Clive thought for a moment about the other girl, Coral. And about Judi.

In his front room, Clive had a framed print of the Battle of Waterloo, a collection of imported pornographic magazines, a CD player and a VHS recorder and video tapes of all Torvill and Dean’s greatest performances. In his kitchen, he had a case of expensive wine, a robot-chef and a microwave oven. In his lavatory, he had copies of
The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook
,
The Naff Sex Guide
and
How to Be a Wally.
In his work-room, he had a licensed handgun, five thousand pounds in small notes and a fax machine.

In his basement, he had a dead prostitute with her arm cut off.

A
s near death as he had ever been, he tried to slither over the beaten earth of the alley. His face hung off his skull in lumpy rags. One of the cuts had been high up and at the back of his head, and a torn curtain of skin and scalp had flapped forwards over his face. It hung over his eyes and nose like a wet scarf. Since his own pain had long since ceased to mean anything to him, he felt almost at peace in the red darkness.

The irony of it was that the men who had done this to him knew nothing about his real nature. They had killed him simply because they were paid to. He would kill them, but without true malice, or even true relish. If people habitually treated each other like this, who could blame the Kind for the way they treated the human race? Of course, it was really his own fault. He knew that he should never have got mixed up in politics.

He had tried to change when they assaulted him, but there had been eight or ten of them and they were very skilled in their profession. Using iron bars and sharp knives instead of crosses and cats’ cradles, they had caught him efficiently before he could make himself more dangerous and ripped him apart. They had broken his arms and one leg, and his pelvis was twisted out of shape. Consequently, he could not roll himself over and had to try crawling face up. He grew horny talons, curving them into the hard ground. His hands clawed at the ground like scuttling crabs and pulled the heavy bulk of the rest of his body towards the mouth of the alley, assisted only by the occasional inchworm push of his good leg.

Arriving in Istanbul between the coming of talking pictures and the Wall Street Crash, he had drifted into the restaurant trade, turning a particularly vile brothel into a fashionable nightclub. He hired singers who actually could sing, rather than belly-dancers renowned only for their ability to pleasure simultaneously an inordinate number of patrons, and he replaced the group of criminals, cripples, degenerates and relics who had served as an orchestra with genuine musicians from Paris, London and New Orleans. Finally, he had struck an exclusive deal with Turkey’s leading importer of American phonograph records, so that his club would introduce the latest Cole Porter or Irving Berlin song to Istanbul weeks before the Fred Astaire or Paul Whiteman versions became available.

It started to rain, and he began to feel as if vinegar were being pissed into his open wounds. Perhaps he had not outgrown pain after all. The entrails piled on his empty belly must be steaming. Somewhere above, but quite near, he heard music. It was Victor Young and His Orchestra with The Boswell Sisters, performing ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store’. He stopped crawling, and feeling came back to his misaligned elbows. He tossed his head, and the bloody flap lifted from his face and fell more or less in its proper place. He looked down at himself. He was already covered with flies, and a scraggy monkey, a refugee from some street act, was picking at one of his ankles. It looked hungry enough to forget it was supposed to be a herbivore.

As usual, he had got bored with an easy life, and expanded his operations. He had never entirely taken his establishment out of the business of procuring, and he soon rekindled his taste for the marketing of human flesh. He imported girls, and boys, from Greece, Egypt, various Balkan pretend countries, India, China, even the Socialist Workers’ Utopia across the Black Sea. Then, he found his acquaintances became useful in furthering a varied trade in foods, drugs, armaments, icons, rare books, general contraband and murder. Money had always bored him, but his interests also enabled him to build up a fortune in the simplest, least tangible, most negotiable currency in the world – information.

Stiffening his back for the purpose, he sat up suddenly. He dragged his arms from behind him and deposited his hands in his lap. He brushed the dirt and flies off his coiled bowels and pressed the functional mass back into his body. He reached for the cummerbund that had been torn off him during his murder, and wrapped it tightly about his midriff, easing shut the wound, that had disembowelled him. His insides realigned themselves, itching and burning by turns. He felt ready to use his arms again and reached for the monkey.

At first, he had dealt only with a mountain of a colonel in the Turkish Secret Police, supplying him with interesting tit-bits about the many foreign nationals who passed through his club. Then, he had delicately approached, in turn, the local representatives of Germany, Russia and Great Britain. There would be yet another war eventually, and Turkey was in such an odd spot on the map. Squeezed between three troubled continents and theoretically neutral, it was naturally at the centre of all manner of legitimate and illegitimate merchant and refugee activities, and the site of diplomacy and espionage on a scale he had not seen since his dealings with the papacy in the 14th century. It had eased the tedium to see the nations of humankind scheme and plot against one another, and to be able to take a hand in the shaping of the War that would change everything again.

The monkey’s meagre meat and brief flare of dreamstuff helped, and he was able unsteadily to stand up. He smoothed his forehead and scalp over his skull, and tore away the dead tatters that clung to his cheekbones and neck. They had cut off his genitals and stamped them into the dirt. That was supposed to be a warning to his associates. It did not concern him much. Thorough his assailants might have been, but they had also shown a typically human lack of imagination in their treatment of him. After so many centuries of torture and violence, he would have thought that men would become practised in the artistry of feeding. But no, the race was still saddeningly small-minded.

He had been amused by the opportunity to juggle with the interests of so many nations and individuals, and had capriciously exploited the situation. Once he had denounced an innocent American tobacco trader as a dangerous enemy spy to the Nazis and the Soviets, and doubled his money by accepting two commissions to arrange his assassination. But someone or other had discovered one of his duplicities, or taken offence at one of his transactions, and had paid a gang of waterfront knifemen to drag him into this alley and ruin him.

Soon, he would be whole again. Then, his murderers would be his meat and drink. And he would find out who had employed them and feed off him. Then there would be the War, and wars were what he liked best of all. Europe would be a killing ground for a while, a banquet for the Kind. Then, he thought, he might go back to the United States. He had the feeling, listening to the torch songs of that nation on his Victrola, that America was about to become the most interesting country on the globe. The Old World was using itself up fast. There was life for the taking beyond the Atlantic, and a vitality which could feed him for decades.

In an upstairs window, a girl appeared. She was not beautiful, but she was not fat and disgusting either. She saw him as a stranger loitering in the dark alley below and routinely exposed her breasts to him.

He stepped into the light, and looked up at her. She did not scream. In her mind, she said she had seen worse.

‘That’s what you think,’ he said out loud in the wrong language, one she did not understand. Through exposed and bloody teeth, he began to serenade her.

‘Say it’s only a paper moon,’ he sang, ‘Sailing over a cardboard sea, but it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me…’

Fascinated, she remained in the window, waiting for him to come up to her. She was his instantly. He saw her entire life, from birth to this moment. Roumanian originally, Macha Igescu was seventeen years old, working for Demetrios Malacou. She loved him because he beat her less than her last protector, never more than once a week. She had had two babies – both sold by Malacou to strangers – and her dreams were befogged by the poppy smoke. She was nearing the end of her professional life. Malacou, she knew, would dump her for that plump-titted Arab bitch, and she would be sold on into some dark dormitory to do her work chained to a cot.

He promised himself that he would find Malacou and kill him for Macha. He would not feed off the pimp; he would just open his throat and let him empty. After all, he was going to owe Macha for his life.

Latching his fingerhooks into the crumbling stonework, he began his climb…

I
n Brewer Street, all the sex shops had identical notices up in their windows. A Merry Christmas to All Our Customers. The season of goodwill to all men gets everywhere. Anne wondered whether the girls in the Live Erotic Nude Bed Show had to wear Santa Claus hats and reindeer antlers. Weary shop assistants had been busy hanging paper lanterns from the rubberwear, and winding silvery tinsel through displays of sex aids. In a centrally-heated style shop, customers got to choose between purple and turquoise trenchcoats, assisted by young girls with cycle shorts and partially-shaven heads. A record store had a cardboard cut-out of Derek Douane, the teenage ex-choirboy who had inflicted ‘Christmas Caroline’ on the human race. Anne hurried past his fixed smile, trying not to think of the burbling, thought-destroying tune that could get into your brain and settle for hours. The traffic was snarled, and bike messengers were gleefully whizzing their way through the gridlocked maze of personalized numberplate limousines and delivery vans. In New York, this would occasion a din of honked horns, but the British drivers just sat and fumed in their tincans, waiting for the world to get better. Outside a Chinese take-away, three pigeons pecked determinedly at a splash of frozen sick.