Now money had usurped — the talk of money.
‘Ten million euros each, paid through the Caymans or the Bahamas. That is the price we should be looking to pay, Reuven. Pay too much too quickly and the vendor worries. Pay too little, haggle too much, and the vendor goes elsewhere. A total of twenty million euros, which is available on call. That’s a decent price for the two properties.’
Reuven Weissberg stood alongside Josef Goldmann. He listened to Josef when the talk was of money. Viktor, Mikhail and the young Englishman, who walked with an awkward limp, were away from them and could not have heard their conversation. It was a residential street without residents. Reuven Weissberg had no interest in the investments that Josef Goldmann placed in his name, or in using the profits that Josef Goldmann fashioned for him. He thought he sensed excitement in the man, as if the opportunity to trade gripped him with pleasure. Reuven thought the houses gaudy and pretentious, and he believed they would attract attention from the revenue authorities. He had many such investments, and his identity was hidden in the paperwork by the names of the nominees Josef Goldmann created for him.
‘Yes, I can do that. You leave it with me and I’ll do it. I think, Reuven, they’re very suitable for you, and there isn’t a better part of Berlin for return on capital investment. This area, off Königstrasse, between the lake and Potsdam, will become the new residence of the capital’s élite. Consider it done.’
He thought that Josef Goldmann would have chosen either of the houses — if he should ever move from London to Berlin — as a home for himself, Esther and his children. Goldmann believed an address made a statement. The statement that Reuven Weissberg made was an apartment in the city centre that was small, adequate for himself and his grandmother, enough. Josef Goldmann had said he would not move without the young man, Carrick, at his side. He had babbled about an attack. Reuven had heard the story, but had interrupted once to put a single question: had there been warning of an attempt on Josef’s life? ‘No warning. Nothing has ever happened in London that gave me to believe I might be a target for assassination. I tell you, I had one piece of luck, one, but it was sufficient. My English driver, an idiot, was caught by the police while off-duty with excess of alcohol in his blood. I upgraded Johnny. I let him drive me into the City. I was leaving a meeting, coming on to the pavement, and was attacked and Grigori, whom you chose for me, froze and was useless. I would have been dead but for Johnny, his courage. He risked his own life to save mine, and it was lucky he was with me.’ Then they had come to the houses and the talk had changed to money.
‘But the reason I’m here, is that in place?’
Reuven nodded.
A breathy hiss. ‘You risk so much for all of us … On my side, all is prepared.’
Reuven cuffed his launderer’s arm.
‘If you had asked my advice, I wouldn’t have suggested …’
He walked away.
‘… that you proceed. But you didn’t ask it.’
He quickened his stride, turned his back on the two houses he would buy. First, Josef Goldmann scurried to keep pace with him, then the three other men — Mikhail, Viktor and the Englishman — jogged to catch up. He thought the one called Johnny had a good face, perhaps an honest face … It was three days away, and two old men drove from Sarov to deliver it, and he did not take advice on the matter — would not … He remembered that his own man, Mikhail, had not reacted with sufficient speed to block the gunmen who had shot him in the arm, had not risked his own life. It was an honest face.
In the car park, Bugsy circled the vehicle. Back when he had started his career, an electronic tracking device had been the size of a house brick and had needed clamps and supports to hold it in place — always more reliable than the magnets police forces used. Graduating out of the workshops — in the secure lock-ups of what had seemed, to a casual eye, a small industrial estate in Kennington — he had reckoned ETDs to be high risk. Then they had called the brick-scale metal boxes ‘tags’, still did.
He only needed one circuit of the car that had driven Target One and November to the lakeside and the car park at the near end of the iron bridge. It was a perfunctory check. In his steel case in the back of the minibus, Bugsy had a selection of tags that ranged in bulk from a cigarette packet to a matchbox. Easy enough to attach one — and easy enough to blow the whole show away.
He turned away from the car. He understood the importance of getting a tag under or into it, but shook his head — to himself — ruefully as he calculated the risk factors. In the ideal world that, as a professional, he hankered for, Bugsy would have identified the make and series of a vehicle, then called the showroom that sold it and a demonstration model would have been delivered. It would then have been driven into the lock-ups and lifted up on a ramp. He would have crawled under, over and through it to learn where was the best chance of secreting a tag, then the tag would have been activated and Bugsy would have checked the quality of the signal. He prided himself on that professionalism, and on his ability to make the decision as to where in a car the most satisfactory hiding place equated with minimum interference in the signal the tag emitted.
If they were organized crime — which the guv’nor, Mr Lawson, said they were — then it stood to reason they would have access, and frequently, to the best gear. Trouble was, their gear was usually better than that issued to Bugsy from the industrial-estate workshops. The trick that high-level organized crime employed, in Bugsy’s experience, was to drive a few kilometres, stop, deploy with the detector, then sweep. Good tactics. The batteries of a tag had a life of no more than twenty hours and were activated by remote. A target car drove away and the tag was switched to transmit, but the chances were pretty damn near certain that there would not be time to cut the transmission bleep before the detector had registered the signal — even if it was on ‘deep snore’, the weakest — and that was a show blown away.
Bugsy reached the minibus and went past it to the car to report.
He thought that the guv’nor might be dozing but an eye was opened when he climbed in. The girl they called Charlie watched him keenly.
Bugsy said, ‘Wouldn’t be possible to lodge a tag and maintain integrity. Sorry, but we have to do without.’
The guv’nor nodded, didn’t seem disappointed.
Bugsy said, ‘Not the circumstances where I could do the business and feel satisfied. Just have to be the eyeball stuff.’
The girl, Charlie, reacted — blazed. ‘Brilliant. Left out on his own, is he? Aren’t you aware of the shit he’s facing? How do we keep close if there’s no bug on his wheels? Have you a better description, or is this cutting him adrift? I thought you were supposed to be the bloody expert.’
Bugsy said, ‘If you didn’t know it, Miss, putting our November in a vehicle with a tag in it, and the tag’s found, puts him at higher risk. And I am the bloody expert and that’s my assessment. Oh, and putting a wire on him adds to a greater risk. When it’s possible I’ll do it, and when it’s not I won’t. Got me, Miss?’
He went back to the minibus, unlocked it, climbed in. He settled on the back seat. He was alone. The others, his travelling companions, were all across the far side of the bridge, putting the eyeball on November. Adrian and Dennis would be up front and closest. He’d seen November walking away over the bridge that spanned the narrow point and had thought the man pale-faced, shoulders hunched, as if his confidence ebbed … Well, it would, wouldn’t it? He was alone, cut off from them. He thought of the meal he had toyed with last night in their hotel, foreign food that he couldn’t abide, and he yearned for what he would have had the previous evening if he’d been at home — a village in the Surrey hills near Guildford — a plate of butcher’s sausages, the chips his wife cooked and sharp brown sauce in a puddle across them.