This was not the time for the old school act, the stiff upper lip in the face of adversity, holding out for your own set of standards come what may. We had to play by their rules, simple as that. ‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ said Rusty, ‘How much will it cost to bring the venue up to date?’
He did a bit of chin rubbing. ‘It is difficult to say…’
I could barely contain myself. I was pinching myself to stop myself bursting out laughing. He was like a cartoon gangster from the Sixties. Except this guy was for real. As was his gun.
He carried on doing his Marlon Brando impersonation. ‘Well, let me see. These certificates don’t come cheap, you know. A lot of work is involved.’
Rusty was getting impatient now. ‘Look. Cards on the table. What do you want?’
‘Let’s say if you put in an envelope 300 tickets for the event tomorrow night, we can arrange all the details.’
So that was it. Sorted. Three hundred tickets for the black market. Touted at double the face value of $25 each, that’s $15,000. A nice little earner for one night’s work. I knew he would keep it sweet for us. We’d followed their rulebook. I knew he would put the word out to let the event go ahead without further interruption.
My heart sank when Serge turned up again three hours later with one of those looks on his face. Surely I hadn’t got him so wrong? Was this the sting? Did he want another 300 tickets? He smiled. ‘We do good business together. I like you and Rusty. To say thank you, my men will look after your event, make sure it goes smooth. You will find they are first class. They do a lot of this work in the bars and clubs around town.’ It goes without saying that we accepted his kind offer.
The convention passed off without a hitch. Serge kept his bargain. His heavies did a good job and they had the advantage over us of speaking the language. Whilst the Red Army soldiers were stationed up and down all the aisles looking like ornate commissionaires, Serge’s team were mixing it on the front barricades, keeping back the seething hordes of over-enthusiastic Muscovites, shouting and swearing at them in Russian.
Our principal jetted off back to the States early the next morning. We had a few hours to kill before our flight to London. Time for a bit of R & R, I thought. I had access to an S-class Mercedes that we’d used to ferry around the executives, so I thought I’d do a tour of the Moscow sights in it. I got hold of one of the Russian translators who’d been working with us and asked him to show me around. We got talking in the Merc and it turned out he was ex-KGB! Not only that, but he showed me his old ID card. There he was in his uniform with all his medals on. He had been a colonel! I asked, ‘What are you doing as a translator?’
‘Ah well. What can you do? When the Berlin Wall came down a lot of us KGB guys were kicked out. We were no longer needed. We’ve done what you guys have done. We’ve set up private security companies. Now I am a translator and bodyguard.’
So there I was being driven round Moscow by an ex-KGB colonel. I thought, ‘My God! Times have changed. Fantastic!’
He insisted on taking me to the outskirts. ‘You must see this,’ he said. ‘This is why the Russian Army is not going to win any more big wars. Look over there.’ He was pointing to acres of allotments full of vegetables. Young men were tilling the soil. ‘You see those men? They are conscripts in the Russian Army. They don’t get paid properly or fed properly. They have to grow their own food. This is the Russian Army of today. Their morale is rock-bottom. They are only young kids, straight out of school some of them. And this is what they have to do.’
We headed back into town and suddenly he said, ‘Watch out. Here we go.’ In front of us there was a Portakabin and barriers, just like a Northern Ireland checkpoint. ‘Traffic police. It’s the car,’ he said. He pulled up into the side of the road just before the barriers. ‘Do not worry. Do not worry. I will claim it on my expenses.’ With that he got out his driving licence and a folded a hundred-dollar bill into the centre of it. ‘Now watch this.’
We drove forward to the barrier. It was manned by this fierce-looking guy and he was dressed like the Gestapo. He knocked on the window. My driver wound the window down and they exchanged a few words in Russian. He handed the guard his licence. The guard made the hundred-dollar bill disappear into his inside pocket like Paul Daniels on speed. Up came the barrier and we were through without another word. As we drove off, the KGB guy said, ‘If I hadn’t done that, you see that Portakabin? They’d have whipped us in there and interrogated us for hours wanting to know who we were, where the car came from, where did we get our money, had we paid all the taxes. Standard procedure. You grease their palm and they wave you through. They see the car and they see dollar signs in their eyes.’
The trip came to a successful end. Serge had looked after us. They were clever people. Business is business, Russian style. As long as you greased the palms of the men who mattered, everything would be fine. They didn’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They didn’t want to double-cross people or make excessive demands which would deter companies from coming to Moscow altogether.
Suits you sir! I enjoyed this lifestyle, the world of big deals and bigger business. It was regular work and it was very well paid. The bonus with this job was that I really liked the principal. Being his bodyguard, I had to have many a restaurant meal with him. He wasn’t at all the prima donna, the remote, ruthless boss. He was very friendly and approachable. That’s why I was so devastated when he died at the tragically young age of forty-four.
After that, my work suddenly dried up. That was bad enough. But worse was to come. I was careering headlong towards the gutter. Something happened which meant I was on the verge of losing my security operator’s licence. If I lost that, I’d lost my whole livelihood.
How come my licence was under threat? I was up in court on a charge of assault and battery.
30
Revenge is Sweet
You can’t beat a good punch-up. It’s the best possible therapy, an instant stress-reliever. What is it the medics say to depressed people, ‘Get more exercise’? Well a good punch-up is the finest stress-relieving workout in the world.
And I’ve had a few punch-ups in my time, probably more than my share. But was it all the result of the stress of combat? Was I going down with PTSD? Absolutely not. And I can prove it. Just like I got a piece of paper from Ward 11 to prove I was sane whilst I was still serving in the SAS, I can prove I’m not now suffering from PTSD. How can I do that? I’ll tell you how. I can prove it because I beat up my next-door neighbour.
Trouble had been brewing for months. They were the original neighbours from hell, totally out of control. They’d have fearsome rows in the house with the windows wide open, and we’d hear the pair of them swearing at each other in the garden. The language was filthy. I was remarried by now, and my daughter couldn’t even go in the garden at times, she was so upset. To make matters worse, he had a highperformance car with a loud exhaust. He’d often come back at one or two in the morning, deliberately revving it up on the drive, waking up the neighbourhood. I didn’t storm in at the first provocation. I gave them bags of slack. I turned a blind eye, hoping it would go away. But it didn’t.
It all came to a head in September. It was a lovely warm afternoon, and he’d recently purchased one of those mini-motorbikes, with a proper little engine and a proper tinny little noise. Really, really annoying. The pitch of the noise just cut right through you, and it was grating on my nerves. This particular day he’d started revving it in the middle of the afternoon and he went on revving it for at least an hour and a half. I’m all for a bit of give and take, a bit of live and let live. But at the end of the day, I’m not Mother Teresa. I thought, ‘Right! Enough’s enough. I must have words.’