‘I bet they are,’ Carlyle said bitterly.
‘You might be on the Mayor’s website already.’
‘I’ll go and have a look,’ Carlyle replied, heading for the lifts.
ELEVEN
Adrian Gasparino was shaken from his reverie by the sound of gunfire, heavy calibre. It was close. Very fucking close. Then the wall above his head exploded and shards of baked mud landed on his head as his brain tried to engage.
It took him another moment to realize the firing was coming from inside the compound. Clutching his SA80, he threw out a hand to grab the American, Withers. ‘C’mon!’ he hissed. ‘Move!’ There was no response. Turning towards the American, he realized that the sergeant had taken a round in the chest. He wouldn’t be going anywhere.
‘Bollocks!’ As the ground started exploding at his feet, Gasparino’s survival instinct finally kicked in. Snaking to the left, he threw himself through the doorway of the hut. Inside, in the sweaty gloom, he kept his head firmly on the ground, his eyes equally firmly shut, listening to his heart beating so fast that he thought it would have to burst right out of his chest. The shots kept coming but none of them seemed aimed at him. Gasparino could hear a range of different weapons now as the coalition troops engaged in the firefight.
How long he stayed like that, he couldn’t say. Finally, he lifted his head half an inch off the ground, opened his eyes and peered out, just in time to see the ANA guy with the M240 take two shots to the head and crumple to the ground. From the four corners of the compound, coalition soldiers swarmed over their erstwhile allies, disarming them and pushing them to the ground, screaming at them to get their hands over their heads. Quickly, with a minimum of fuss, the boys did what they were told. Following them down, Gasparino’s gaze fell on the three ANA soldiers who had been caught in the crossfire. Then he saw the body of Sergeant Spencer Spanner, lying at a crazy angle, his head stuck under his right arm, a pool of blood already drying in the dirt. The medics weren’t making any effort to revive him.
‘Oh, fuck!’
Stifling a sob, Gasparino struggled to his feet. As he did so, he felt a searing pain in his left leg. Looking down, he saw the blood dripping onto his boot and realized that his war would be finishing even earlier than expected.
Sitting at his desk on the third floor of the police station, Carlyle surreptitiously Googled ‘Mayor of London’. Christian Holyrod’s official site came top of the list of searches and he clicked on it. The front page was full of the usual politician’s guff about how the Mayor was probably solely responsible for improving everything to do with the capital, for London’s inhabitants and visitors to the city.
‘Oh yeah?’ Carlyle looked at the photo of Holyrod, in thoughtful repose, above a list of his aims to deliver a cleaner city, safer streets, better transport and good quality affordable housing.
Nothing about closing down strip clubs then. Carlyle clicked on the link that said Mayoral Webcasts and was confronted by a menu of videos with appealing titles such as GLA Intelligence Seminar: Visualizing London; London Waste and Recycling Board Meeting and Representation Hearing on Southall Gas Works Site. Resisting the temptation to peek at any of those, Carlyle chose the video at the top of the list. Entitled Cleaning Up London: Working with the Police, it had been added to the site earlier that morning. With a heavy heart, he opened up Windows Media Player, sat back in his chair and waited for the 3:12 video to start. Over a breathless commentary explaining ‘the Mayor’s plan’ to crack down on illegals working in London, he watched some shots of Sergeant Bishop leading the other uniforms into Everton’s. Once the action moved inside, so many of the shots had to be heavily pixilated that it was impossible to work out what precisely was going on.
Carlyle let the video run for another minute or so but it was just about unwatchable. ‘Your tax money at work,’ he mumbled angrily to himself. Relieved, he was just about to close it down, when the video cut to a familiar face – a very familiar face. The bastard film-maker had indeed given him a starring role in the Mayor’s poxy video. Worse, the bloody thing had been cut to show him running around like Inspector sodding Clouseau.
‘Oh, fuck!’ Carlyle groaned. Never mind PC bloody Lea, he was never going to live this down. The inspector pulled the video-maker’s card out of his pocket and stared at it for ten seconds. ‘Well, Mr Danny Craven of Scattered Flowers Productions,’ he growled, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’
Sitting in an otherwise deserted pizza restaurant on Allée de Coubron, Dominic Silver picked at his salad. Seeing three boys shot in the face had done nothing for his appetite, but business etiquette demanded that he had to make the effort. Taking a long drink of San Pellegrino, he politely declined a refill from the two-thirds full bottle of Domaine d’Aussières 2008 sitting on the table.
‘What?’ the old man frowned. ‘You don’t drink?’ At the table he looked tired and fragile. With the gun in his hand, he had looked ten years younger – twenty when he was pulling the trigger.
Dominic said politely, ‘As a rule, not during the day. And rarely when I’m conducting business.’
‘I can respect that,’ the man nodded, tucking in to his plate of cavatappi pasta with hot-spiced beef.
Dominic dropped his fork onto his plate. ‘What did you say to those boys?’
Chewing thoughtfully, Tuco Martinez gave the impression of having to dig deep into his memory in order to recall the morning’s events, even though they were barely an hour old. ‘Ah yes,’ he said finally, waving his wine glass as if he was about to make a toast. ‘I told them that when you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.’ He let out a harsh laugh. ‘Good advice for them to take to the grave.’
Dominic looked at him blankly.
‘You like Westerns?’ Martinez enquired.
‘Cowboy movies? John Wayne?’
‘Yeah.’
‘They don’t really make them any more, do they?’
‘No, they don’t. Not like the old days.’
Dom smiled. ‘It’s all gangster movies these days.’
‘Ha! We’re just too popular for our own good,’ Tuco joked.
‘So,’ Dom tried to pull the old fella back on to some kind of track, ‘when you have to shoot . . .’
‘It’s a line from the film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ the man explained, taking a mouthful of wine. ‘From my namesake, the Eli Wallach character.’
Dominic thought about it for a moment. He liked spaghetti westerns well enough, but he couldn’t remember anything about that one other than the title and the fact that Clint Eastwood was in it. Mind you, if he remembered rightly, Clint Eastwood was in most of them. ‘It’s a great line,’ he said limply.
‘Damn right!’ His host nodded vehemently. ‘Excellent advice. If only those useless bastards in Hollywood would pay attention now and again.’
Dom frowned. How did they get on to a rant about the movie business?
‘I always hate it,’ the old guy continued, ‘at the end of a film when the bad guy keeps talking away, unravelling the plot, and gives the good guy time to wriggle off the hook and save the fucking day. Just shoot the bastard, I say. You can explain everything to his corpse. Let the bad guy win for once – everyone would be cheering in the cinema!’
Everyone’s a critic, Dom thought sadly. ‘This guy, he had your name?’
‘Tuco Ramirez,’ the man laughed. ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was my dad’s favourite film, and Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, was his favourite character. We used to watch it all the time. That’s how I got my name. I was his little Tuco.’
‘I see,’ said Dominic, smiling weakly. Fucking hell, he thought, I’m going into business with a psycho granddad named after a crazy character in a cowboy flick. He felt a bitter pang of regret seep through his stomach, and gave himself a silent warning: Better keep your wits about you on this one, old chum.