“Vere are you from, Dougie?” she purred. “Not from round here, eh?”
“What do you reckon?” he said archly. “Where d’you think I got a name like Dougie from, heh?”
Lola laughed, put her finger on the end of his nose.
“You are from Scotland, yes?”
“Aye,” nodded Dougie.
“Where in Scotland?”
“Edinburgh.”
“Vot’s it like in Edinburgh?”
A warning voice in Dougie’s head told him not to even give her that much. This story she had spun for him, it sounded too much like a fairy tale. She was probably some down-on-her-luck Balkans hooker looking for a sugar daddy. No one could have had the lifestyle she described. It was too far-fetched, too mental.
The touch of her finger stayed on the end of his nose. Her green eyes glittered under the optics. Before Dougie knew what he was doing, words were coming out of his mouth.
She had given him the germ of an idea. The rest he filled in for himself.
Venus in Furs was not run by an established firm, even by Soho standards. Its ostensible owners were a bunch of chancy Jamaican wide boys whose speciality was taking over moody drinking dens by scaring the incumbents into thinking that they were Yardies. Dougie doubted that was the case. They could have been minor players, vaguely connected somehow, but Yardie lands were south of the river. Triads and Micks ran Soho. He doubted these fellas would last long in the scheme of things anyway, so he decided to help Lola out and give fate a hand.
Trying to help her, or trying to impress her?
It helped that her shifts were regular. Six nights a week, 6 till 12. Plenty of time to observe who came and went on a routine basis. Maybe her old man really was KGB cos she’d already worked out that the day that the Suit came in would be the significant one.
There was this office, behind the bar, where they did all their business. Three guys worked the club in a rotation, always two of them there at the same time. Lynton, Neville, and Little Stevie. They had a fondness for Lola, her being blood, so it was usually her they asked to bring drinks through when they had someone to impress in there. She said the room had been painted out with palm trees and a sunset, like one big Hawaiian scene.
Like everyone, Dougie thought, playing at gangsters — they’re playing Scarface.
Once a week, a bald white guy in a dowdy brown suit came in with an attaché case. Whichever of the Brothers Grimm were in at the time would make themselves scarce while he busied himself in the office for half an hour. One of them would hang at the bar, the other find himself a dark corner with one of the girls. Then the bald man would come out, speak to no one, and make his own way out of the club.
Every Thursday, 8 p.m., punctual as clockwork he came.
That proved it to Dougie. The lairy Jamaicans were a front to terrify the public. The bald man collected the money for their unseen offshore master. With his crappy suit and unassuming exterior, he was deliberately done up like a mark to blend in with the rest of the clientele.
Dougie had a couple of guys that owed him favors. They weren’t known faces, and it would be difficult to trace them back to him — their paths crossed infrequently and they moved in different worlds. On two successive Thursdays, he gave them some folding and sent them in as marks. They confirmed Lola’s story and gave him more interesting background on the Brothers Grimm. Both weeks, it was the same pair, Steve and Neville, little and large. Large Neville, a tall skinny guy with swinging dreads and shades who was always chewing on a toothpick, sat behind the bar when the bald man showed up. He practiced dealing cards, played patience, drank beer, and feigned indifference to the world around him, nodding all the while as if a different slow skanking soundtrack was playing in his head — not the cheesy Europop on the club’s PA.
Little Stevie, by comparison, always grabbed himself a girl and a bottle and made his way over to the corner booth. While Neville looked like a classic stoner, Little Stevie was mean. He wore a black suit and a white shirt, with thick gold chains around his bulldog neck. A pork pie hat and thick black shades totally obscured his eyes. Ocassionally, like when the girl slipped underneath the table, he would grin a dazzling display of gold and diamond dental work. Neville always drank proper champagne — not the pear fizz served to the punters as such — and both Dougie’s contacts copped the telltale bulge in his pocket.
Neville’s booth was the one from which the whole room could be surveyed, and even while receiving special favors, he never took his eye off the game. The minute the office door clicked open and the bald man slipped away, he would knee his girl off him, adjust his balls and whatever else was down here, and swagger his way back over to the office all puffed-up and bristling, Neville following at his heels.
Yeah, Stevie, they all agreed, was the one to watch.
While they were in there playing punters, Dougie was watching the door.
The Venus was based in a handy spot, in a dingy alley between Rupert Street and Wardour Street. There was a market on Rupert and all he had to do was pretend to be examining the tourist tat on the corner stall. The bald man went the other way. Straight to a waiting cab on Wardour. Each time the same.
On the night it all happened, Dougie felt a rush in his blood that he hadn’t felt since Edinburgh, like every platelet was singing to him the old songs, high and wild as the wind.
God, he used to love that feeling, used to let it guide him in the days when he was Dougie the Cat, the greatest burglar in that magical city of turrets and towers.
But now he was Dougie Investigates, the private eye for the sort of people who couldn’t go to the police. He had changed sides on purpose after that first prison jolt, never wanting to be in close proximity to such fucking filth ever again. If you couldn’t be a gentleman thief these days, he reckoned, then why not be a Bad Guys’ PI? His methods may have differed from those used by the Old Bill, but Dougie had kept his nose clean for eighteen years, built up his reputation by word of mouth, and made a good living from sorting out shit without causing any fuss. Filled a proper gap in the market, he had.
His blood had never sung to him in all that time. He supposed it must have awakened in him that first night he met Lola, grown strong that night she’d finally allowed him back to her dingy flat above a bookie’s in Balham, where she had so studiously drawn out the map of the Venus’s interior before unzipping his trousers and taking him to a place that seemed very close to heaven.
Bless her, he didn’t need her map. He didn’t even need to know what Neville and Stevie got up to, only that they were good little gangsters and stayed where they were, in that little palace of their imagination where they could be Tony Montana every day.
He wasn’t going to take them on.
All he needed was the thirty seconds between the Venus’s door and Wardour Street. And the curve in the alley that meant the taxi driver wouldn’t be able to see. All he needed was the strength of his arm and the fleetness of his feet and the confusion of bodies packed into a Soho night.
At the end of the alley he slipped a balaclava over his head, put the blue hood over the top of that, and began to run.
He was at full sprint as the bald man came out of the door, fast enough to send him flying when he bowled into his shoulder. The man’s arms spread out and he dropped his precious cargo to the floor. Dougie was just quick enough to catch the look of astonishment in the pale, watery eyes, before he coshed him hard on the top of his head and they rolled up into whites. He had another second to stoop and retrieve the case before he was off again, out of the alley, across Wardour Street, where the taxi was waiting, its engine running, the driver staring straight ahead.