Painkillers (12 page)

'Yes, but this is hardly ICAC's scale: you'd think with an ordinary case like this ICAC would refer him down to the SCG,' I said.

White fixed me with his discoloured eyes. He smiled. 'They did,' he said. The doors opened.

He said, 'Frank Hamley's had this on his books for two months now.'

I was so surprised, I nearly got stuck in the doors.

'So when you run your paperchase,' said White, as I caught up with him, 'on Top Luck and these brokers, you might keep a weather-eye open for Frank Hamley. See how he reacts to what you're doing. Yes?'

I felt dizzy.

White stopped. 'This is mine.' He pushed the remote button on his car key, and a nearby white Porsche 911 blinked and serenaded him.

I found my voice, somehow. Maybe it wasn't my voice. Maybe it was someone else's. It sounded very odd. 'Are you accusing Frank of obstructing an investigation?'

'Whatever,' White said, losing interest in me. He crossed to his car. A bolt of anger shot up my throat. 'I don't answer to you,' I said. 'I don't have to tell you what my boss does or doesn't do.'

'Well of course you don't.' He looked at me like I was stupid. 'You got seconded to the Weird Sisters, didn't you? I'm just the errand boy. It's them you have to tell.'

'Well, why the bloody hell would they think Frank's obstructing?' I pleaded.

'How the fuck would I know?' He shed his suit jacket. Its metallic thread caught the lights. It glittered, like it was wet. He opened the driver's door and threw the jacket over onto the passenger seat. 'It's you that works for him,' he said.

TWO

London

Summer, 1998

14.

Boots never turned up. Eventually Eva gave up puzzling over his disappearance. Did she accept that he'd run out, in the couple of seconds the door had stood open that day? Or had she consigned the puzzle to whatever part of her couldn't see the bruises on my neck, or hear the Wray and Nephew bottles clinking about in the trash? I didn't know, and I didn't care to know. I was still waiting for Boots's mummified tongue to turn up one day, mulching a flower-bed or blocking a drain. There were no more little warnings. I tried not to think about it too much. The work, incidentally, was as Money had promised: clerical, easy, almost legitimate.

When Jimmy Yau vanished under the waves, he left behind a hotel in Mauritius, fifty-one per cent of the shares in a Salt Lake City bottling plant, and interests in tea plantations in Kenya, titanium sands in Malawi, container shipping in Nagasaki and oil from the Gulf. These were the major businesses, and at a first glance they seemed legitimate. Big enough, anyway, to employ a real workforce and keep up at least a pretence of normal trading.

The scary part of the animal was its soft accretion of dormant, shell and holding companies. Funds passed through them allincluding the dormants, which was far from sensiblebut where from and why and to whom these funds were eventually to go, it was next to impossible to find out. Jimmy Yau had functionaries in the usual places: Hong Kong and Macau, Belgium and Amsterdam, Toronto and even Miami; their names kept coming up as directors, treasurers, company secretaries and so on. They were courteous enough on the phone, because why wouldn't they be? They were getting their take from the cash flow; in return, it was their names on the paperwork and it was they would be carrying the can should the authorities trip over whatever it was they were doing. Money wanted me to set about liquidating any company that couldn't show a legitimate yearly trading record. 'Import-export,' she sneered, reading off my scratch-pad, 'is that all you could elicit?'

'He owns the company, Money,' I said. It was 11amtoo, too early to have my balls broken. 'As far as he's concerned I'm just some curious gweilo at the wrong end of a phone line. If I tell him to pack up and he calls my bluff, what am I supposed to say? Either we find what it is Jimmy had on these people or we let them get on with it and look suitably blank when they implode.'

I glanced down my crib sheet. That 'import-export' business had no warehousing and had paid nothing to manufacturers since 1978. 'And that's only the start of it,' I said. 'Once we get control of bastards like this, once we start laying off staff...'

'Staff?' Money barked, incredulously. 'This company employs people?'

'That's my point,' I said, gently. 'The paperwork says yes. Instinct says noit says that this is simply a laundering outfit. But if its paperwork has created the illusion of employees, we have to maintain that illusion. We have to make these paper employees redundant. We may even have to pay them. All so the tax records tally. Believe me, if this outfit is a laundryif its import-export business is entirely fictitiousclosing it down is going to be like defusing a bomb.'

'And how many companies like this are there?'

'Altogether, or the ones that make no sense?' I didn't want her to panic. If she did she might be tempted to throw in the towel and give evidence at the enquiry. If she did that, she wasn't going to be able to protect herself, let alone me.

Besides, the more she bought into the dream of legitimising her dead husband's concerns, the longerand betterI got paid. So far she'd been more generous than I had expected. She'd even arranged me an alibi for the time I spent working for her. I was now the proud manager of a long-dormant software publisher in Holborn.

'The ones that are obvious trouble,' said Money. 'How many companies?'

'One hundred and forty-seven,' I said.

Eva was impressed when she saw my job offer, the letter-headed paper, the address. 'Darling, you're back in the City.'

'It's hardly that,' I said. The aliens in my chest squirmed with embarrassment. They scrabbled at my chest wall, desperate to bail out.

'How did you find out about this?'

'I rang Mike,' I lied. 'He's just back from Hong Kong. He said that time he phoned he might put some business my way.'

'Well?'

'Well what?'

'So come on,' she insisted, eagerly, 'tell me.'

Luckily for me, I'd spent that afternoon reading the company's scrapbooks.

'Telex verification,' I told her. And, 'Their platform-independent financial software ran on the Arpanet.'

All true. I hazed and hazed, and meanwhile the taste in my mouth got worse and worse. At least Eva was pleased, more pleased than she'd been in a very long time - and the sheets didn't smell of dog any more.

Afterwards she said, 'Are we going to ask Mike and Ylwa over for dinner?'

15.

I started work most mornings at 6.30am, which meant I could ride into work with Eva. But the main reason for the dawn start was Hong Kong's punishing time difference. Nobody takes you seriously out there after lunch, and they're five hours ahead of GMT. I worked best in the mornings, fuelling my way through a solids-free business day with take-out cappuccinos laced with Wray and Nephew. I was drinking a whole lot less now I wasn't having to keep the bottle in a hole in the wall. Money agreed I should have my own office, and paid the deposit for a room above a sandwich shop opposite Southwark Cathedral. A spot of brinkmanship, that - a little touch of the old Hong Kong gambling ethicmy working so near Eva's cafe. It wasn't long before I began to enjoy my double life. Fooling Eva wasn't something I felt good about, but it sure as hell helped me nail the lid shut on the emasculated duffer I had been. After a year pouring wine for Kwok and Flora and the rest of Eva's Hong Kong cronies, like Max in Sunset Boulevard, I deserved a break or two. There's great pleasure, I discovered, in propping your feet on your forty-quid office-surplus steel desk, leaning back in your broken-down swivel chair with foam busting out of the arm-rests, and telling a silk-suited poacher on the other side of the world not to bother shipping his container of oh-so-innocent leather goods this month, or next month, orcome to thatever again.

Money had learned most of her management techniques from her husband: more often than not, it was I who had to go visit her. Brian and Eddie stomped around madly as soon as I crossed the threshold. The moment my calf-skin bag hit the living-room table, Eddie would do this yuppie riff with his mobilerunning through stored number after stored number until he found someone he could say 'Hell, mate, yes,' toand then they'd take off, Eddie and his talented animal assistant Brian, tearing the gravel drive to shit in their 4X4.

'Little farts.'

'Zoe.'

'Sorry, mum.'

Dinners were tense affairs. Money and I had nothing in common. Zoe said little; her blind grey eyes paralysed me.

'And how is Justin?' Money asked, every time. If my wife could have seen her flat expression as she trotted this line out, time after time, it would have allayed all her fears.

'Oh,' I said, 'much the same.' Once or twice I had launched into an account of life at the schoolhygiene lessons, singing games, group outings, gym-workon and on, until you could have cracked the glaze on her eyes with a teaspoon. It never made any difference. Every time it was the same. The same.

'Oh, much the same,' I said, with my brave little smile.

She never quite knew what to say next. Week after week, the formula she sought eluded her. 'Oh good,'

she'd say, and then qualify it immediately, realising she should have said, 'Oh dear,' and then she'd qualify the qualification, figuring that, as there was no hope for him, it was rude of her to be rubbing it in. It wasn't how it once was between Eva and I. The smart young shark in his suit and his cellular phone; his adoring young wife reading Hong Kong Tatler at home: we could never be that way again, thank God. What we had now was new and uncertain.

Eva had sensed the change in me, and liking it, gave it a chance to grow. Relieved of the need to beat up on me, able somehow to trust me again, her own pain receded, and something youthful and bright returned to her crinkled, bedroomy eyes.

We didn't know how to behave with each other. We floundered happily, shaping out the new space we were making together. At night, we grappled with each other, drowning and saving each other at once. They were nights when the sex got us so high, I really didn't care very much whether I was getting away with whatever it was I was doing. Afterward, of course, my heart was in my throat. Awaiting judgment, I kicked the duvet off the bed and tried to pry ropes of twisted sheet out from under my back. Eva was moving about the en-suite bathroom in a shambling, beat-up sort of way. 'Jesus Christ.'

'What?'

'My face.'

'What's the matter?'

She came in and posed for me, red cheek turned, eyes shining. Proud. 'Vicious sod.'

'Let's see your arse.'

It was very red. I stroked her buttocks with the backs of my fingers; let them ride down the backs of her legs; drew a circle in the small of her back, round and round. She crumpled onto the bed. She couldn't keep her tongue out of my mouth. It was like the first times. No it wasn't. It was tougher than that, raw and scary and honest. More violent in its demands than any play-rape.

'Christ you're impossibly hard.'

We didn't know what to do with it. She was too sore; I was scared of her teeth.

'Don't worry about it,' I said.

'But I love it.'

'I know you do.'

'I do.'

'It knows.'

She wrapped her legs around me. I moved, touching her cunt with the tip of my cock, withdrawing, touching. Her hair prickled me. She pulled me close and laughed into my ear, until after a while the laughter grew regular and desperate, and I knew she was crying.

I kissed my way across her neck to her chin, her cheeks, her eyes.

Ironic, that the dreadful threats we'd lived through should have given us this: a new start, after all. Strange, that by my deceiving her, we could be more properly ourselves. She had waited for me for so long. So long, she had waited for me to come back to her. Did what she could to keep me whole. Failed, yes: but failed while meaning well. I felt no gratitude towards her: nothing so cold as that. No guilt, either, for turning out the way I had - the bottles hidden in the wall. All that mattered in the end was that she had waited and I had weathered, and now we were here, together, and her tears had stopped and I was still licking her face and it was starting to get ticklish and awful and she was laughing and trying to push me away -

'Ugh. Get off.'

I pinned her hands to the bed and gave her mouth a wet lick.

'Drink!' she squealed, threshing about under me.

'What?'

'I thought that'd stop you.'

I tried to lick her again. She fended me off. 'Drink! Drink! I want to get pissed!' She crawled off the bed.

'I'll be back in a sec.'

'Love you,' I sighed, as she went out the door.

'Love you too.'

'I Love you.'

'LOVE YOU.'

It went on like this, stupidly, the way these things do. It was a long way down to the kitchen and we were screaming at each other just to be heard.

'I fucking love your cock.'

Clink. Smash.

'Oh fuck...'

'Are you okay?' I shouted. I sat up. 'Zoe?'

The aliens flexed and tittered.

'Yeah.'

Zoe...

Had she heard?

They were laughing, oh yes. They were rolling around. They were splitting their sides.

'Adam?'

'Yes?'

'Ice?'

'Yes, yes.'

She hadn't heard. She hadn't, hadn't.

'Here I come.'

I heard her on the stairs. I strained for breath. The aliens were still laughing, they were sucking up all my oxygen. She stood in the doorway, her arms full of bottles, lovely green bottles. I gasped it out.

'I love you, Eva.'

Eva smiled a melting smile. 'I love you too, Adam,' she said.

16.

The next day, Money phoned me to say that her father-in-law had just died.

'I'm sorry to hear that, Money,' I said.

It was early in the afternoon, twenty-five degrees in the shade, and outside it sounded like the world was ending. Builders from Rattee & Kett were taking down their scaffolding from round the newly restored Southwark Cathedral. An ambulance had got log-jammed on London Bridge and was trying to blast a path clear with its siren. Two doors down, a bunch of boorish suits had strayed across the river for a boozy lunch outside the Mug House wine bar. Normally around now I'd have cooled off with a walk by the river, but only yesterday at this time I had seen Hannah walking towards me down Park Street, laden with bags from Neal's Yard Dairy, and I'd barely time to get out of sight. I didn't dare take a risk like that again.