‘Am I just being a dumb ole Irishman, or is this guy talking a load of horseshit?’ O’Shaugnessy asked Meade.
The sergeant smiled sweetly. ‘Oh, he’s definitely not talking horseshit, sir, and if you didn’t understand it that’s probably because he didn’t explain it clearly enough.’ He turned to Blackstone. ‘Try again, Sam,’ he suggested.
‘If we lay out all the mistakes you’ve made on the table for you to see,’ the Limey said, ‘you’ll immediately start going round cleaning them up. And once you have cleaned them up, they won’t be mistakes any more. Which is the last thing we want — because without your mistakes, you’re no use to us.’
‘Let me be quite clear on this,’ O’Shaugnessy said. ‘You’re threatening me, ain’t you?’
Meade turned to the Limey again. ‘Told you he’d be bound to catch on eventually,’ he said.
They seemed so sure of themselves — so much at ease — O’Shaugnessy thought. So maybe they really did have something on him. But, hell, he was a precinct captain, and he was damned if he was going to be threatened by a detective sergeant and a Limey.’
‘I’ve had enough of listening to your crap!’ he said. ‘I want you out of my office. Now!’
Those few words — delivered harshly by a captain renowned for his violence — should have been enough to have the two men scurrying away like a pair of frightened rabbits.
Yet they weren’t! Meade stayed perfectly still and the Limey actually crossed his legs as if he was settling in for a long session.
‘Have I got to call in a few of my boys to help you out of the office?’ O’Shaugnessy demanded.
‘You could do that,’ the Limey said.
But there was something in his voice which suggested that doing it would be a mistake, and almost against his own will, O’Shaugnessy heard himself saying, ‘You’ve got five seconds to come up with a reason why I shouldn’t.’
But it was at least ten seconds before Blackstone spoke again, and when he did, he said, ‘A smart man would cover all his options. Are you a smart man, Captain O’Shaugnessy?’
‘Smart enough,’ O’Shaugnessy said. ‘Smarter than any goddamn Limey, that’s for sure.’
But he didn’t quite believe it himself. And even if he was smarter than Blackstone, he still felt uncomfortable. There was a power about the Limey that went beyond mere brute force — a power which meant that even if you were beating the shit out of him, he would, somehow, still be in charge.
‘A dumb man would argue that even if we have strong evidence against him — and you’re right, we may not have strong evidence, it could all be a bluff — it still wouldn’t matter,’ Blackstone said. ‘The dumb man would argue that given the level of corruption in this city, we’d only have a very slim chance of bringing him down even with top-class evidence.’ He paused. ‘How big a chance would you say we have, Alex? Twenty per cent?’
‘More like twenty-five per cent,’ Meade said.
‘So the dumb man would throw us out of his office, just as you’ve been threatening to do,’ Blackstone continued. ‘The smart man, on the other hand, would say to himself, “Is it worth running the risk, even if that risk may only be twenty-five or thirty per cent, when, if I do these people a little favour, I can have a zero per cent risk?”.’
O’Shaugnessy felt a sense of relief he hadn’t even known he needed to feel. So all these guys wanted was a bribe. They were firmly back in his world — a world in which he was a captain, and they were nothing. And maybe he would pay them the bribe, not because he had to, but because it was reassuring to know that, deep down, everybody was the same.
‘How much do you want?’ he asked. ‘And remember, boys, don’t be too greedy.’
‘You haven’t been listening, Captain,’ the Limey said coldly. ‘We don’t want money — we want a favour.’
‘What kind of little favour?’
‘Do you play chess, Captain?’ the Limey asked.
What was it with this guy? O’Shaugnessy wondered. First it was analogies and now it was chess.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t played,’ the Limey said. ‘It is quite a stretching game.’
‘I’ve played,’ O’Shaugnessy said, because he’d be damned before he admit to this Limey bastard that there was anything he couldn’t do.
‘Then you’ll know that on a chess board, you have sixteen pieces under your control, but that they’re not all of the same value.’
‘Sure,’ O’Shaugnessy said, unconvincingly.
‘The names we give to the major pieces are bishops, rooks and knights, but we might as well call them sergeants, politicians and judges — and their main job is to protect the king at all costs.’
‘That would be you, Captain O’Shaugnessy,’ Meade said.
‘I knew that,’ O’Shaugnessy growled.
‘And as well as the major pieces, there are the minor ones,’ the Limey continued. ‘The pawns. The little people. There may be knights and bishops left on the board when the game ends, but the pawns have usually all gone, because that’s their role in life — to be sacrificed when necessary.’
‘What the hell is this Limey talkin’ about?’ O’Shaugnessy asked Meade.
‘It will all be clear in a moment,’ Meade promised.
‘And in this case,’ Blackstone continued, ‘the pawn we want you to sacrifice goes by the name of Mrs de Courcey.’
‘You want me to arrest her?’ O’Shaugnessy asked.
‘No, nothing like that. All we want you to do is to starve her out for a few days.’
‘Starve her out? How?’
‘Stop selling her booze, cigarettes and food, and make sure no one else does, either.’
‘That all?’
‘Not quite. We’d like you to post a couple of patrolmen outside the brothel, to prevent her clients from going in.’
‘She pays me good money to look after her,’ O’Shaugnessy said.
‘She’s a pawn,’ Blackstone said dismissively. ‘You’re not there to serve her interests — she’s there to serve yours.’
‘An’ what are all the other madams who pay me goin’ to think, if I treat her like that?’
‘They’ll think that you’ve decided to make an example of her,’ Blackstone said.
‘What d’ya mean? Make an example of her?’
‘When I was in the army, I used to have to watch men being flogged,’ Blackstone said. He stood up, and raised his hands above his head. ‘The soldier was tied up like this, and the shirt was ripped from his back.’ He lowered his arms again. ‘Then the flogging would begin.’ He swung his right arm, as if slashing a whip through the air. ‘The whip would bite into the flesh, and blood would begin to pour out of the gashes.’
O’Shaugnessy and Meade looked on, mesmerized. They could almost see it happening — could almost hear the whip as it whistled through the air, and the dull thud it made when it landed on the naked flesh.
‘Sometimes the man being flogged would be guilty of a serious infraction of military discipline,’ Blackstone continued. ‘But sometimes the flogging was hardly merited at all — sometimes the man would have committed only the most trivial of offences.’ He paused for a moment and lowered his whip hand to his side. ‘Tell me, Alex, what do you imagine the men who were forced to watch this spectacle thought as they saw a man who’d done virtually nothing wrong being flogged to within an inch of his life?’
‘That it wasn’t fair?’ Meade guessed.
Blackstone laughed. ‘You poor simple child,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have got that answer from you, would I, Captain?’
‘No,’ O’Shaugnessy agreed, ‘you sure as hell wouldn’t.’