"I'm here to see PM," said Donovan.
The man nodded, his face impassive.
"He expecting you. Third floor. Door with "Fuck off' on it."
"That would be irony, would it?" asked Donovan.
"That would be the way it be," said the man.
Donovan pushed his way through the crowded first floor and found the stairs. The air was thick with the smell of marijuana and sweat, and the music was so loud his teeth vibrated. Teenagers sitting on the stairs drinking beer from the bottle looked up at him curiously as he walked up to the second floor. The wooden stairs were stained and pockmarked with cigarette burns.
One of the second-floor bedrooms had been converted into a bar. There were tin baths filled with ice and loaded with bottled beer, and a table full of spirits and mixers. Two black guys with turtle-shell abdomens and red and white checked bandanas were passing out bottles and shoving banknotes into a metal box without handing back change. There were several white girls around, predominately thin and blonde and baring their midriffs, but no white males. Donovan was attracting a lot of attention, but there didn't seem to be any hostility, just curiosity.
One small man with waist-length dreadlocks and a vacant stare grinned at Donovan, showing a mouthful of gold teeth, and offered him a puff at his soggy-ended joint, but Donovan just shook his head.
He went up to the third floor of the building. At the top of the hallway two young blacks wearing headsets and almost identical Nike hooded tops, woollen hats, tracksuit bottoms and trainers, moved aside without speaking to Donovan. The big man must have told them he was on his way up.
The "Fuck Off sign was written with black lettering on a gold background. Donovan knocked and the door opened partially. A pair of wraparound sunglasses reflected Donovan's image back at him in stereo.
"Den Donovan," said Donovan.
The man opened the door without speaking. Donovan walked in to the room. Half a dozen West Indians were sitting around the room on sofas, most of them smoking spliffs and drinking beer. Sitting behind a desk was a young black man with close-cropped hair wearing what looked like a Versace silk shirt. Around his neck hung a gold chain the thickness of a man's finger, and on his left wrist he wore a solid gold Rolex studded with diamonds.
"PM?"
The man at the desk nodded.
"Den Donovan."
"I know who you are," said PM. Standing behind PM was a black man well over six feet tall dressed in a black suit and grey T-shirt. He had shoulder-length dreadlocks and a goatee beard.
Donovan smiled amiably.
"Charlie and Pvicky said I should swing by. Pay my respects."
"What happened to my money, Den?"
"Your money paid for the coke, and the coke is sitting in one of The Queen's warehouses," said Donovan. He walked over to a sofa and sat down.
"It's swings and roundabouts. A percentage of deals go wrong. You have to live with that. Build it into your price."
"That don't answer my question."
"If you want to know why the deal went wrong, you're asking the wrong person."
"Someone grassed."
"Probably."
"And it was your deal."
"I set it up, yes, but these things grow. More people get involved. The more people get involved, the greater the risk."
PM slammed his hand down on to the desk.
"Fuck the risk. I want my money back."
"We all lost on this deal, PM."
PM reached into a drawer and pulled out a massive handgun, a black metal block with an inch-long barrel and an extra-long clip. Donovan recognised the weapon. It was a Mac-io machine gun. Lethal at short range, but unpredictable. It was a spray-and-pray weapon. Spray the bullets around and pray you hit something.
"PM, you pull the trigger on that and there's gonna be bullets flying all around the room."
"Yeah, but first one's gonna be in your gut."
"You know they pull to the right, yeah? To the right and up."
"So I'll aim left and low."
The man with the dreadlocks took a step forward. He fixed Donovan with a cold stare.
"You got any suggestion as to how we can get our money back?" he asked. The fact that he was the only one other than PM to open his mouth meant he was probably the one called Bunny, PM's adviser.
"You have to write it off. You can put that thing against my head and threaten to blow my brains out all you want, but I don't have your money. We're all in the same boat: you, me, Packy, Charlie, the Colombians who supplied the stuff."
"When things go wrong, there's always someone at fault."
"Agreed, but I didn't fuck up. Neither did Charlie and Pvicky. The Colombians are experts. It was either bad luck or someone new to the equation."
"You pointing the finger at us?" asked Bunny.
"There's no point in trying to apportion blame," said Donovan.
"We have to move on."
"And how do we do that?" asked Bunny.
PM seemed to relax a little. He put the gun back in the drawer, then leaned back and swung his feet up on the desk. He clicked his fingers at one of his men and the man fetched him a bottle of beer.
"I can cut you in on another deal. Heroin."
"Price?"
"Ten thousand a key."
PM drank his beer as Bunny rattled off quick fire questions.
"Source?"
"Afghan. Pure."
"Delivered where?"
"UK. South of England."
"Specifically."
"An airfield."
"You're flying it in?"
"That's the idea."
Bunny leaned forward and whispered into PM's ear. PM nodded as he listened but kept his eyes fixed stonily on Donovan's face.
"How much?" asked PM, when Bunny had finished whispering.
"Up to you."
"We'll go eight a key. And we'll take two hundred."
"Eight? I said ten."
"Yeah, but you owe us for the coke deal. And I figure if you're letting us in at ten, you're getting it for three or four, right?"
Donovan didn't say anything. He was paying the Russians three thousand dollars a kilo, about two thousand pounds. Even letting the Yardies in at eight grand he was still making a profit of three hundred per cent.
"I'd be cutting my throat at eight, PM. Nine."
"Eight five."
Donovan hesitated, then nodded.
"Eight five it is. You're sure you can move two hundred?"
PM's eyes hardened.
"You think we're smalltime, huh?"
"Two hundred is a lot, that's all."
"We can move it."
"That's great. I'll get Charlie to arrange the money with you." Donovan stood up.
"One thing," said PM coldly.
"This gets fucked up, so do you. Bad luck twice in a row ain't no bad luck. I'll be pointing more than my finger. Clear?"
"Clear, PM."
The man with wraparound sunglasses opened the door and the pounding music billowed into the room.
"You drive here?" asked Bunny.
"Cab," said Donovan.
"Was worried about losing the CD player."
Bunny laughed throatily.
"I'll walk you down, fix you up with a ride."
Donovan nodded his thanks, and Bunny followed him down the stairs and out on to the street.
"Thanks for taking the heat off me," Donovan said to Bunny.
"The safety was on," said Bunny.
"Yeah, I saw that."
"Figured you did."
They walked slowly down the road, talking in quiet voices.
"Couldn't ask everything I wanted to know without cutting across the man, but this Afghan gear, where's it coming from?" asked Bunny.
"The easy answer to that is Afghanistan, but that's not what you mean, right?"
"Ain't no way you're flying it out of Afghanistan. There's opium there, but the processing is done outside. Pakistan. Or Turkey maybe."
"My contacts are in Turkey."