Jaggy Splinters (9 page)

I failed. Me. I was gubbed. I was humiliated. My reputation was effectively erased, as surely as I knew my identity would have to be also. Even my memories have been all but stolen: when I look back upon the things I have done, I can no longer view my victories as anything other than a prelude to my ultimate defeat.

But believe me, that’s still not it.

My nemesis, my embarrassingly improbable nemesis, did all of this to me. He destroyed my great scheme, wiped out my crew and even cast me down to what he reasonably assumed would be my death. However, my greatest wound, the strike that has had me reeling ever since, he delivered with mere words.

There are four teenage males running along the sand, lanky and awkward, suffering that phase nature has the decency to hide inside a cocoon in other species. They bellow guttural laughs as they bear down obliviously upon the man and his child. The child instinctively moves closer to the man as the group approaches, seeking security, protection. The man smiles down, offering reassurance with a ruffling of the hair, but his eyes remain vigilantly upon the teenagers, positioning himself to deflect any accidental contact.

The man is about my age, I estimate. He looks younger when he smiles, but his true years are revealed as his face sharpens in ready defence. The child resembles him facially; I can see that even from here. Even if he didn’t, there’d be no questioning the relationship: the man is alertly attendant upon the child, but the clincher is that the child looks up at him as though the world is his to command.

‘How does it feel to know you’ll never see your son grow up?’ I asked him, Larry, my improbable nemesis, when I thought I still held the power of life and death.

‘You tell me.’

Now, I’ve analysed and deconstructed this little exchange many, many times in order to exhaust every avenue of interpretation, but even as I did so I knew I was merely trying to find an escape-clause in the small print. I had a gun pointed at his head, so he had to say something to buy himself some time, surely? Granted, but it was still a hell of a thing to just pull out of your arse at zero notice. And as he said it, there was a cold sincerity about him, a conviction that couldn’t be entirely accounted for by mere anger or hatred. Under the circumstances you could hardly have described it as smug, but it was definitely the look of one who knew he had something on me; he wasn’t only telling me I had a son I’ve never met – he was telling me he had.

I have a son.

Through simple deduction and arithmetic I know who by, I know where and I know when. But I do not know him, not even his name, and there are insurmountable reasons why he will never – let’s face it, must never – know me.

So how d’you like them apples?

I didn’t want a child. Like that needs to be said. Hard to imagine fitting much in the way of family life around a busy schedule of assassination and wholesale slaughter. But discovering, knowing he’s out there… oh Larry, you really stuck it to me, didn’t you? He’s loose in my head, toddling around, opening lids and doors and closets, and I seriously don’t want him to see what’s inside any of them.

That, in case you haven’t guessed, is it. He’s in there, and he’s running the show, whether I like it or not.

I have in the past transformed myself, or at least attempted to do so: cast off old trappings and emerged as what I imagined to be something new. But whether it was swapping my Queen records for Bauhaus or my Stratocaster for Semtex, the person inside never changed. Larry called that right. This, though, this truly feels like a transformation by some ancient power far beyond my control. This, as Freddie and the boys put it, is a kind of magic.

I’m forced to see the world through my son’s eyes, as though new to me, my perspective involuntarily transferred. It’s an attempt, if not to feel him, then at least to feel what it’s like to be him. Then I see it once more through my own, and I feel a dread darker than anyone else could know; well, maybe not anyone else, but we’d be talking about a very short list. I feel a dread because I know what kind of men are sharing this world with my son.

Evil men. Men like me.

I’m feeling a new, alien emotion. Maybe it’s not alien, maybe it’s not even new. Maybe it’s an instinct that’s always been there, dormant, only recently activated. I feel a drive to protect, an anxious concern for this child of mine whose face I have never seen and whose name I do not even know.

I sense his vulnerability. That’s something for which I’ve always had a facility: I sought out the undefended, probed for weakness, then gleefully exploited it. This vulnerability instead puts me on edge, compels me to vigilance. I consider the carnage I have strewn about me, and I am appalled to think of him getting caught up in something like that: collateral damage, among the gormless, faceless lemmings who just can’t help but find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is worth more than that, more than them. Far more. He is flesh of my flesh, my son, and the thought of someone harming him does not merely worry me – it offends me.

Deeply.

It is for this reason, therefore, as I sit here watching another father tend and protect his offspring, that I feel unexpectedly inclined to act upon certain information that has today become pressingly pertinent, but to which I would previously have been utterly indifferent.

A four-year-old English boy has gone missing from one of the big villas on the other side of the Old Port. It’s all over the island this morning; everybody knows about it. That’s why that father on the beach, like every other parent here, is staying that bit nearer to his precious child, watching that bit closer, grateful he has not been punished for lacking the same vigilance twenty-four hours ago. The kid’s face is on the front of the local paper, and the police, plus dozens of volunteers, are combing the area. Divers will be brought in too, inevitably, but only if the parents are smart enough not to tell the cops about the ransom demand they are about to receive.

I know this because I know who has done it.

All life passes this bar, here in my sun-kissed purgatory, and it doesn’t have to be wearing a bikini to catch my eye. It therefore failed to escape my attention on either of the occasions that Risto Balban and his moron brother, Miko, sauntered conspicuously along the boardwalk, having evidently travelled here in the past month with Club Thug. Risto used to be a big noise in the Kolichni separatist rebel movement, which employed his kidnapping and extortion skills to political and fundraising ends. Some of those funds ended up in my pocket for services rendered, which is why I know his face. But this was before his political convictions waned in the face of his realisation that he could get up to the same hi-jinks independently without having to hand over the resultant cash to any pompous ideologues in balaclavas.

It’s common knowledge within certain less-than-exalted circles that he and Miko have been busying themselves around southern Europe ever since. They target the most upmarket holiday residences (not much ransom to be got out of the
Sun
-reading classes) and go for kids of four years and under because they don’t tend to be much cop when it comes to giving the police descriptions. That’s the ones whose parents keep it shut and pay up in time, of course. But despite their industry, you won’t have heard about any of this, because the authorities in tourism-driven economies can bring rather a lot of pressure on the local plods regarding their after-the-fact interpretation of such events. Who’s going to go down to Lunn Poly and book up for ‘that resort where the wean got kidnapped last summer’? So the local kiddy-fiddler gets fitted up for murder, the ‘isolated incident’ is solved, and the Balbans move on. They’ve worked Greece, Turkey, the Black Sea, moving from island to island, coast to coast.

And now they’re here. Risto: the brains of the operation, lithe, sharp-featured, canny, paranoid. Miko: tubby, thick, obedient and loyal, as proven by the metal holding his legs together since a mutually unsatisfactory interrogation at the hands of the Russian military. I knew what they were here for, I knew what they would do, and at the time it didn’t seem to be of any import. I have always considered their activities vulgar, but none of my affair; indeed my principal concern when I saw them was whether my surgery would pass the eyeball test. However, now that they have actually done it, I find myself experiencing an unaccustomed outrage that I know I will not be able to contain. Besides, as I have said, I’m feeling a little different these days.

I sit in my car and watch the villa, easily identified by the police cars at the gate. I wait. I will give it an hour, I decide. This particular exercise is to ensure that my good deed goes unpunished, but there are other ways of doing that if an opportunity fails to present itself this morning. After twenty minutes, however, it does. I see the father walking out of the driveway with a push-chair, occupied by a tiny infant. He stops briefly to exchange words with one of the cops, gesticulating towards the buggy. He’s telling them he’s just taking the little one for a walk, but his other hand looks like it’s the only thing holding his head on, so I know differently.

I get out of the car and pace myself to catch up with him out of sight of the police. He stops at a bench overlooking the water and sits down, offering the infant a bottle of water. The infant smiles at him and he smiles back, trying to hide how he’s really feeling. I don’t know whether the baby’s buying it, but I’m certainly not.

I sit down next to him and speak facing out to sea.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I tell him. ‘And the answer is no. Don’t tell the cops.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Ransom demand. Phone call. Voice-disguiser, right?’

He stares at me, standing up. I remain seated, still looking out to sea.

‘Who are you? How do you know this?’

‘If they even think you’ve told the cops, they’ll kill the boy and move on. To them, it’s not worth the risk; they can start again elsewhere tomorrow. You can’t.’

‘Listen, tell me who the hell…’

I turn to look at him, removing my shades so that he can see my eyes.

‘I’m going to bring him back.’

‘You’re going to…’ Confusion and indignation give way to desperate hope. ‘How?’

‘That’s my concern.’

‘I don’t understand. Who are you?’

‘I’m in a position to help, that’s all. I can’t say any more.’

‘And what’s in it for you? What do you want, money? How do I know you’re not part of this?’

‘I’m not. And I don’t want money. But I do need two things from you.’

‘What?’

‘First, that you follow my advice and don’t tell the cops.’

‘Christ, I haven’t even told my wife yet.’

‘And second, that when I return your son, you forget I ever existed.’

‘If you return my son, I’ll remember you for the rest of my life.’

‘No doubt, but you don’t need to tell anyone, do you?’

In tracking kidnappers, knowing whodunit is far less crucial than knowing where they are, but if you know enough about the who, ascertaining the where is a straightforward – if sometimes necessarily messy – process. In this case, it is enough that I know the Balban brothers, not having much of a portfolio, prefer to invest their disposable income in concerns yielding a more immediate dividend: to wit, sex and charlie; or more accurately, hookers and charlie, given that the concept of Risto or Miko getting laid without paying for it is known in most cultures as rape. I know also that they are unlikely to be indulging in the former vice while they have a houseguest, so consumption of the latter is bound to increase by way of compensation.

I call several local suppliers, with whom I have, shall we say, a rapport, and run message-boy Miko’s description by them. Arturo at the casino (where he is by far the busiest dealer), confirms a portly source of much recent custom. I make a business proposition and we arrange to meet within the hour. Upon my instruction, Arturo rings the mobile number Miko gave him and offers him the drugs equivalent of a fire-sale: he tells him he’s having to get off the island in a hurry, and as he can’t take his stash with him, the whole lot is available at a knock-down price, for a limited time only. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Miko goes for it with all the restrained dignity of a piranha, agreeing to a meet early this evening. I pay Arturo the shortfall in the price arranged with Miko, plus a little more for his trouble, then head for a tool-hire outlet in the industrial area of town.

I watch Miko emerge from a BMW and approach the casino, walking as ever like a gorilla bursting for a shite. He’s dressed in an evening suit in an attempt to look inconspicuously respectable, but given that primate gait and his mangled features, the jacket and tie in between look sufficiently incongruous that he might as well be wearing a T-shirt stating ‘In-bred gangster trash’. I watch him enter the casino, then try his car door and find it unsurprisingly open. It’s a common conceit among these criminal also-rans that people – especially their fellow crooks – are somehow aware of how baaad they are and would therefore never dare fuck with their person or their property. I lie down in the rear footwell and prepare to disabuse Miko of both presumptions.

He returns inside ten minutes, giggling like a kid who’s raided the candy shop. I wait for him to place his prize in the glove compartment and reach for the ignition before spiking him in the neck with a hypodermic full of thiopentone. He reacts reflexively with a slap, thinking the jab is an insect bite, by which time the agent is already in his blood and my silencer in his face.

‘Sweet dreams,’ I tell him.

Miko awakes to find himself strapped securely to a steel table in a low-ceilinged, windowless room. We are in the cellar of my villa, in the hills overlooking the port, but Miko doesn’t know this. Nor does he know that he’s about to become nostalgic for the hospitality of those Russian soldiers.

He comes round slowly, groggily at first, but sharpens up very quickly as he takes in his surroundings and realises the circumstances. I remain behind him at the head end of the table. If he strains his neck muscles he can see me, but for now he is scanning the cold stone walls, bare but for cobwebs, and the ancient, dustbound workbench to his right. On it sit a rusted but serviceable vice, a power-drill, an electric paint stripper, a hacksaw, a boombox and a feather duster. His breathing accelerates and his arms test the restraints. I’m guessing it’s not the duster that’s spooked him, but some people do have awfully ticklish feet. You never can tell.