‘Can I bum one off you?’ Allan asked as usual.
‘And leave an old man on his own?’ Gissing pretended to complain, opening the catalogue at its first page. ‘Go on then, off with the pair of you - see if I care . . .’
Mike and Allan pushed open the door and climbed the five steps leading from the basement bar to the pavement. It had only just grown dark, and the roadway was busy with midweek taxis seeking work.
‘Pound to a penny,’ Allan said, ‘when we go back inside he’ll be bending someone’s ear.’
Mike lit both their cigarettes and inhaled deeply. He was down to four or five a day, but couldn’t quite give them up completely. As far as he knew, Allan only smoked when around smokers -
obliging
smokers. Looking up and down the street, Mike saw no sign of Calloway and his cohorts. Plenty of other bars they could be in. He remembered the bike sheds at school - there really had been bike sheds, though they were only used for improvised kickabouts. Behind them, the smokers gathered at break and lunchtime, Chib - having earned the nickname even at that early stage in his career - chief among them, breaking open a pack of ten or twenty and selling singles at inflated prices, plus another few pence for a light. Mike hadn’t smoked back then. Instead, he would hang around on the periphery, hoping for some sort of welcome into the brotherhood - an invitation that had never come.
‘Town’s quiet tonight,’ Allan said, flicking ash into the air. ‘Tourists must be lying low. I always wonder what they think of the place. I mean, it’s home to us; hard to see it with anyone else’s perspective.’
‘Thing is, Allan, it’s home to the likes of Chib Calloway, too. Two Edinburghs sharing a single nervous system.’
Allan wagged a finger. ‘You’re thinking of that programme on Channel 4 last night . . . the Siamese twins.’
‘I caught a bit of it.’
‘You’re like me - too much TV. We’ll be in our dotage and wondering why we didn’t do more with our lives.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘You know what I mean, though - if I had your money I’d be helming a yacht in the Caribbean, landing my helicopter on the roof of that hotel in Dubai . . .’
‘You’re saying I’m wasting away?’ Mike was thinking of Gerry Pearson, of emails with embedded photos of speedboats and jet skis . . .
‘I’m saying you should grab what you can with both hands - and that includes the blessed Laura. If you nip back to the auction house, she’ll still be there. Ask her out on a date.’
‘
Another
date,’ Mike corrected him. ‘And look what happened last time.’
‘You give up too easily.’ Allan was shaking his head slowly. ‘It amazes me you ever made any money in business.’
‘I did, though, didn’t I?’
‘No doubt about it. But . . .’
‘But what?’
‘I just get the feeling you’re still not comfortable with it.’
‘I don’t like flaunting it, if that’s what you mean. Rubbing my success in other people’s faces.’
Allan looked as though he had more to say, but natural caution won him over and he only nodded. Their attention was distracted by sudden music, pulsing from a car as it cruised towards them. It was a gloss-black BMW, looked like an M5. Thin Lizzy on the hi-fi - ‘The Boys are Back in Town’ - and Chib Calloway in the passenger seat, singing along. The window was down, and his eyes met Mike’s again. He made the shape of a pistol with his fingers, thumb curving itself into a trigger, drawing a bead on the two smokers. And then he was gone. Mike noticed that Allan had been watching.
‘Still reckon we could’ve taken them?’ he asked.
‘No bother,’ Allan replied, flicking the unsmoked half of his cigarette into the road.
That night, Mike ate alone.
Gissing had suggested dinner, but Allan had said there was work waiting at home. Mike, too, made his excuses, then hoped he wouldn’t bump into the professor later on in the restaurant. Thing was, he quite liked eating without company. He’d picked up a paper from a late-opening newsagent’s. Walking towards Haymarket, he’d decided on Indian. Restaurants didn’t much cater for readers - the lights were usually too low - but he was able to find a table with a wall lamp behind it. In the paper, he read that it was crunch time for Indian restaurants - rice shortages leading to price hikes; tighter immigration meaning fewer chefs were entering the country. When he mentioned this to the waiter, the young man just smiled and shrugged.
The restaurant was pretty full, and Mike’s table was too close to a party of five drunks. Their suit jackets were draped over the backs of their chairs. Ties had been loosened or undone altogether. An office night out, Mike guessed, maybe celebrating a satisfactory deal. He knew how those nights could go. People he’d worked with, they’d often commented on how he never seemed to get quite drunk enough, never seemed completely elated whenever a major contract was concluded. He could have told them:
I like to stay in control
. Could have added a postscript;
these days
. The men were on to coffee and brandies by the time his food arrived, meaning that they were getting ready to leave as he asked for his bill. Rising to his feet, he saw that one of the men was losing his balance as he shrugged his arms into his coat. With the diner threatening to back into Mike’s table, Mike held a hand out to steady him. The bleary head turned towards him.
‘What you up to then?’ the man slurred.
‘Just stopping you falling over.’
Another of the group had decided to step in. ‘Did you touch him?’ he asked Mike. Then, to his friend: ‘He lay a finger on you, Rab?’
But Rab was concentrating on staying upright, and had nothing further to say on the subject.
‘I was trying to help,’ Mike argued. The men were gathering round him in a semicircle. He knew how easily these things could turn tribal - five against the world.
‘Well, help yourself right now and piss off,’ Rab’s friend snapped.
‘Before you find your face on the wrong end of a bottling,’ one of the others piped up. The waiters were looking on anxiously. One had pushed open the nearby swing door to alert the kitchen.
‘Fine.’ With his hands held up in a conciliatory gesture, Mike headed for the street. Once outside, he moved briskly along the pavement, glancing back. If they were going to come after him, he wanted a bit of distance. Distance meant time to think, to assess the situation. Risk versus return. He was fifty yards away before the men emerged. They were arm in arm, pointing across the street towards their next destination: another pub.
Probably forgotten about you already, Mike told himself. He knew that he would remember the encounter in the restaurant. In the next few weeks and months there’d be flashbacks, and he would consider alternative scenarios that would leave him the last man standing, the drunks sprawled at his feet. Aged thirteen, he’d got into a fight with a kid in his class and come off second best. For the rest of his school career, he had plotted elaborate revenge scenarios - without ever carrying them out.
The worlds he moved in these days, there was no need to watch your back. The people were polite and civilised; they had manners and breeding. For all Allan’s bravado at the Shining Star, Mike doubted the banker had been in a punch-up in his whole adult life. Walking in the direction of Murrayfield, he thought about student days. He’d found himself in a few bar brawls. Another time, he’d tangled with a potential suitor over a girlfriend . . . Christ, he couldn’t even remember her name! Then there was the night he’d been walking back to his digs with friends and some drunks had lobbed a metal rubbish bin at them. He’d never forget the fight afterwards. It had travelled from the street into an adjacent tenement and out of the back door into a garden, until a woman had screamed from her window that she was calling the police. Mike had emerged with bruised knuckles and a black eye. His opponent had gone down and stayed down.
He wondered how Chib Calloway would have reacted to the situation in the restaurant. But then Calloway travelled with back-up - the two men in the bar with him weren’t just there for the conversation. One of Mike’s colleagues had joked once that he should maybe think about a bodyguard, ‘now that you’re so publicly rich’. He’d meant the publication the previous Sunday of a newspaper list placing him in the top five Most Eligible Men in Scotland.
‘Nobody needs a bodyguard in Edinburgh,’ Mike had answered.
And yet, pausing at a cash machine to take out some money, he looked to right and left, assessing the level of threat. A beggar sat against the shop window next to the bank, head bowed. He looked cold and lonely. Allan had accused Mike once of being a loner - Mike couldn’t disagree; didn’t mean he was lonely. Tossing a pound coin into the beggar’s cup, he headed in the direction of home, some late-night music and his collection of paintings. He thought of the professor’s words -
those poor imprisoned works of art
- and then of Allan’s -
grab what you can with both hands
. . . A pub door swung on its hinges, expelling a drinker into the night. Mike dodged the stumbling man and kept on walking.
As one door closes, another one opens
. . .
3
So far, it had been another bad day for Chib Calloway.
The problem with surveillance was, even if you knew you were being watched, you couldn’t always know who the watchers were. Chib owed a bit of money . . . all right, a
lot
of money. He owed other things, too, and had been keeping his head down, answering only one or two of his dozen mobile phones, the ones whose numbers only kith, kin and close associates knew. He’d had two meetings scheduled for lunchtime, but had cancelled both. He’d apologised by phone without bothering to explain why. If it got out that he was being tailed, his reputation would dip further. Instead, he’d drunk a couple of cups of coffee at Cento Tre on George Street. It was a pretty upmarket spot - a bank at one time. A lot of Edinburgh’s banks had been turned into bars and restaurants. With cash machines everywhere, banks weren’t needed. The machines had brought with them a variety of scams, of course: card numbers skimmed, the cards themselves cloned; devices attached to the machine that could transfer the necessary info to a microchip . . . There were some petrol stations you didn’t dare use. They sold your details on. Chib was careful that way. The gangs with the cash machine know-how all seemed to originate overseas - Albania, Croatia, Hungary. When Chib had looked into it as a possible business proposition, he’d been informed that it was something of a closed shop - which rankled, especially when the gangs then targeted Edinburgh.
It was a small city, population of under half a million. Not big enough to attract the major players, which meant a lot of the available territory belonged to Chib. He had understandings with a number of the bar and club owners. The past several years, there’d been no need for a turf war. Chib had served his apprenticeship in turf wars, building up a solid rep as a soldier. He’d worked as a bouncer for Billy McGeehan at his pool hall and at a couple of his pubs in Leith, just Saturday-night stuff, regulars becoming rowdy as the evening dragged, strangers getting uppity with the locals.
In his early teens, he had thought himself a fair footballer, but a trial with Hearts had been a washout. He was reckoned too big, too awkward.
‘Switch to rugby, son,’ had been the scout’s advice.
Rugby! As if . . .
He’d tried boxing as a means of keeping fit, but couldn’t seem to control himself - got in the ring and wanted to lash out with his feet, his knees, his elbows, thrash the opponent to the floor and keep on thrashing.
‘Switch to wrestling, son,’ had been the advice that time round. But then Billy McGeehan had come to him with another proposal, one that suited Chib fine: he could sign on, pretend to be looking for work, and do some cash-in-hand at weekends - enough to see him through to the next government hand-out. Slowly, Billy had taken him into his confidence, which meant that when Chib switched allegiances and started working for Lenny Corkery instead, he’d taken a fund of knowledge with him. During the war that followed, Billy had decided to up sticks to Florida, signing over the pool halls and pubs, leaving Lenny Corkery king of the hill and Chib his trusted lieutenant.
But then Lenny had dropped dead on the eleventh fairway at Muirfield, and Chib had made his move. He’d been thinking about it for a while anyway, and Lenny’s men hadn’t made any complaint - not to his face, at any rate.
‘A smooth succession is always best for business,’ one of the club owners had commented.
Smooth for the first few years, anyway . . .
Trouble had been brewing for a while. Not his own fault, not entirely: the cops getting lucky with a shipment of coke and eccies, just after the money had changed hands, meaning a double whammy with Chib on its receiving end. This was unfortunate, as he already owed on a shipment of grass that had come into the country by way of a Norwegian trawler. The suppliers, a Hell’s Angels chapter from a town with an unpronounceable name, had given him ninety days to settle.
That was a hundred and twenty days ago.
And counting.
He could have gone to Glasgow, secured a loan from one of the heavyweights there, but that would have meant word getting around. It would involve loss of face. Any sign of weakness, there’d be vultures hovering . . . and worse.