“How many are going to be there?”
“Thousands I understand.”
“Bloody hell.”
The eight skinheads realise that even they might have a little trouble putting fear into thousands of New Age travellers.
“You have friends don’t you?” asks Phelan.
They admit that they do.
“So let’s say you bring in some new blood. Let’s say each of you recruits four more like-minded individuals. Each of you will then be a leader of your own quasi-autonomous force. A force that, at a pinch, can be accommodated in a Volkswagen Beetle. Five of you per car makes forty. That ought to be enough, surely. That’s a lot of aggro.”
The skinheads give it some thought. They obviously want to agree with Phelan. They want to believe they are an elite force, a match for a number of old or new hippies. They also like the idea of being leaders.
“Remember,” says Phelan, “that they have no discipline, that they won’t be expecting you, that they’ll be high on drugs, and that they’re racially inferior.”
Butcher says, “All right, you’re On.”
Phelan looks across at Renata so that she can acknowledge how wonderful, how powerful he is. Then he looks back at the skinheads.
“You may be Nazi scum,” he says, “but you’re my Nazi scum.”
♦
Phelan drives home, Renata beside him, his hand playing absent-mindedly on her upper thigh. He doesn’t drive a Volkswagen Beetle, of course. He prefers the plush, solid certainties of a Mercedes, the make of car Adolf Hitler usually chose to travel in, whatever his feelings about the Beetle.
“They’re a wild bunch,” says Renata, referring to the skinheads.
“They’re the future,” says Phelan.
“The future’s going to be dumb but sexy?”
“There are worse futures.”
“That boy called Butcher, he’s interesting,” she says. “He’s not quite like the others.”
“Do you want to fuck him?”
“I want to fuck them all,” she replies, in a manner that might or might not be serious.
“It can be arranged.”
“I bet.”
For now, however, there is other work to be done. They arrive at Phelan’s home. He lives in a strange, grey, bunker-like industrial building, on the edge of London, in a location that might have been chosen for its appalling proximity to roads and traffic. Its entrance is off a giant roundabout, around which cars and lorries swirl at high speed all day and all night. Six lanes of traffic scream past the back of the building, while overhead a flyover carries vehicles to and from the start of the motorway. Exhaust fumes hang over the area. Tyre noise and engine roar and the deep vibration of juggernauts make the place alive with infernal sound and fury. There are no pavements, no public transport, no place for pedestrians. Phelan says he would live nowhere else. It feels modern and technological. It keeps him sharp and in touch, and it’s also extremely private. If you kidnapped, say, a Volkswagen collector and kept him locked in your basement here, nobody would ever find him. If you then kidnapped his girlfriend, or rather got eight of your followers to do so, you could stash her there too. You could keep them both in captivity, play one off against the other, tease and coerce and torment them until they told you what you wanted to know. Not that they’ve told Phelan anything yet. Marilyn Lederer is being every bit as uncooperative as Carlton Bax; pleading ignorance, admitting nothing. And that’s where Renata comes in. He thinks that a woman’s touch may be just what’s needed, that Marilyn will tell her things that she’d never tell him. And in a sense he’s right.
Once inside the bunker, Phelan goes to the trophy room, the place with the flags and the bed and the military Volkswagen that he uses as a prop for their couplings. Meanwhile Renata goes down to the basement, to the locked room where Marilyn is being kept, to see what confessions she can wrest from her. But Phelan is hardly surprised when Renata returns half an hour later looking disappointed, though not, in fact, as disappointed as Phelan thinks she ought to look.
“She says she doesn’t know anything,” Renata reports.
“And do you believe her?”
“You know, I think I probably do.”
“Well, if she doesn’t know anything then she’s no use to me. I’ll have to get rid of her. Maybe I could throw her to Butcher and his friends.”
“Some girls have all the luck,” Renata says and she goes over and kisses Phelan. He grabs her by the hair, with a studied roughness. She smiles through the discomfort. They go to bed, their minds so full of perverse images that tonight they do not even need to use the Gestapo Volkswagen.
♦
Next morning Phelan gets up, washes and cleanses himself with a thorough, military precision. Renata remains in bed, looking worn out, used, satisfied. Phelan dresses, studying himself closely in a number of full length mirrors the whole time. Finally he’s ready to go about his business. He gets the Mercedes and is ready to drive away from the bunker, leaving Renata to her feigned sleep.
Amid the road noise she listens for the slamming of doors and the start of the engine and when she’s sure that he’s gone, she springs from the bed, dresses quickly and carelessly and runs out to her own car, the yellow Volkswagen that Fat Les smashed and then repaired for her. She drives fast and determinedly through the patterning and interplay of traffic until she arrives at Carlton Bax’s gentleman’s residence.
The gate is closed and there is some police tape tied across it to forbid entry, and yet it is unlocked and it moves and opens easily enough at her touch. The front door of the house and the broken French window have been hastily and clumsily boarded up, and entry wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but she isn’t going into the house, she’s going into the garage where Carlton Bax houses his full-size Volkswagens.
She gets out of her car, opens the boot and removes a tool kit. She uses a crowbar to break open the garage door and once inside she heads straight for the state of the art, electric-blue Baja Beetle. Its doors are open and she positions herself in the passenger seat. The car has a modified dashboard of very cool-looking brushed aluminium. It seems a shame to wreck it but that’s what she’s here to do. She takes a hammer and chisel from the kit and knocks the chisel in behind the dash so that it tears away from the frame of the car. She pulls back the metal until there’s just room enough for her to slide her hand inside. She feels around until her hand touches something small, square and plastic. She grabs it, pulls it out, and sees that she’s holding a piece of buried treasure, a computer disc containing the catalogue of Carlton Bax’s Volkswagen collection.
She pockets the disc, gathers up her tools and heads back for her car, then she drives to her own flat, a place she doesn’t get to very much since she’s been involved with Phelan. She is no computer buff and she hopes the information on the disc isn’t encoded, but since Carlton Bax went to the trouble of physically hiding the disc, she imagines the catalogue will give up its secrets easily enough. She hopes her own limited skills and her own PC will be enough. Then, if this catalogue tells her what she thinks it’s going to tell her, she’ll be able to get out, to write her big article or series of articles, expose Phelan and make a big name for herself as the daring and feisty investigative journalist who infiltrated and cracked a neo-Nazi gang.
She slips the disc into her computer, and sure enough, she was right. The disc gives up its information without too much of a fight. The problem is, there’s so much information and most of it is so desperately dull. She spends hour after hour searching through menus and files, through directories and spreadsheets, peering through windows, scrolling through bleak, dry entries that list and describe innumerable items of Volkswagen memorabilia in exhaustive, obsessive detail, complete with dimensions and colours, date and source of acquisition, and value. There are listings and groupings and cross references, and endless footnotes. Only a nut like Carlton Bax could possibly be interested in this stuff, and then she remembers that a nut like Phelan would be very interested in it too. The day passes. She is drowning in data. There are over 300 entries on Volkswagen key rings alone, and she needs to read each one, just in case the item she’s looking for is hidden there. From time to time she calls up the Help function on the menu, but each time it tells her, “No help is available here.”