Marwick's Reckoning - Gareth Spark Read online

  'We don't know who robbed us out yet' Sean said. 'I have my best blokes looking for 'im right now. There's this fella, Salvador something who has all the gen on that, don't you worry, he's going to spill his guts and we'll find out, reckons he knows everything.' He caught the look Cezar gave his brother. 'Is something wrong?'

  'Salvador Rus?'

  'Yeah,' Sean said, 'that's him.'

  Cezar walked to the edge of the pool. 'We already know who your traitor is, that is no longer something you need to,' he turned, smiling and thought for the most suitable expression, 'lose sleep over.'

  Sean paled a little as he struggled for the best thing to do or say. He played with the gold chain hanging across the fur on his chest. 'You found out, did you?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well, are you going to let me know?'

  'There's no need for you to shout,' Cezar said, walking across to the pool and staring down into the water. 'How well would you trust Marwick?'

  'I trust him,' Sean said sharply.

  Cezar shrugged and said something in Romanian to his brother who winked at Sean as he walked back through the house. Cezar waited until he heard the door close and turned to Sean. 'My brother,' he said, 'is a dog that hates a leash and I am finding it more and more difficult to control him. I do not wish to share everything with him, not just yet.' He shrugged his broad shoulders and said, 'Marwick; Radu will collect him from outside the tower at Esquirol, six o'clock, take him for a drive and we will settle this matter finally. Then,' he walked across to the bar and lay the glass on the bamboo top, 'we have all of our pieces back to the beginning of the game, you and I.'

  'Marwick is my number one,' Sean said, his voice faltering a little at the edges. He felt a tingle of nausea in his stomach, his gown had blown open, and he had not noticed. His body was red and sunburned in the last of the afternoon's light.

  'Perhaps,' Cezar said, 'but he was also on the boat. Why kill Charlie and not him?' He crossed to the door of the house and motioned for Sean to join him. 'Six o'clock, arrange it for me. In the meantime, I want to discuss Casa d'Esclaus; there are one or two things I want you to know.'

  ***

  Sean watched the gates close after their car and closed his eyes. He walked back into the house. His mobile lay on the tile–topped kitchen table and he started to tap Marwick's number into it. 'It would appear your luck has run out,' he said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Marwick woke with a start. The television was on, some old safari movie, and he watched the flickering image of vultures ripping pieces from a dead zebra for a moment, frowning, not fully awake. He had the dead, buzzing fatigue of a hangover that hadn't quite made it to the headache stage and his eyes were heavy. He walked through to the bathroom, rubbed the cold water into his face, and then, for a long time, looked at himself in a small mirror jammed on a shelf above the sink. There was a pair of hairdressing scissors beside it that he picked up, his hand moving slowly as they move in dreams. The fan above the shower cubicle, which came to life when the light switched on, spluttered and growled. The small room smelled of the perfume Louise wore and he smiled. Slowly, he began to clip at his beard, yawning, and then, perhaps by accident, perhaps deliberately, he cut away all the hair on his chin. 'Going to have to come off now, silly sod,' he said to his fatigued reflection, reaching for a tin of shaving foam hidden at the back of the shelf.

  He hadn't seen his face properly for several months and it was like an accidental meeting with an old school friend; you've lost weight; the years are starting to show; you have the face I always felt you deserved. It amused him that so small a change could make him feel better and he flushed the hair piled in the sink down the plughole, feeling he could get back some of the things he'd lost, if only he aimed well enough and for the targets he could hit. Then, perhaps, he could claw back the soul abandoned somewhere out on the dusty plain.

  Marwick stood in the mirrored lift, going down to the first floor. He'd splashed on some aftershave that stung his face and there were cuts across his throat where the razor, which had started to rust, scratched his skin. Otherwise, looking himself up and down, the effect was OK; he wore a loose white shirt he'd found at the back of the wardrobe which, fair enough, needed an iron, but did the trick, and a pair of loose jeans and white trainers. Casual, how he wanted to be. Radu Stelescu, he thought, that crazy fucker; Sean hadn't said why he was going with the Romanian, or where, only that he had to be ready and leave the heavy artillery behind.

  ***

  Marwick took a cab to Esquirol beach and walked to the tower that was set like a headstone against the coming night. There was the empty atmosphere that comes with dusk beside the Mediterranean. Marwick stood beside the tower and looked out to sea. He was aware of the first touches of anxiety biting into his stomach and wrapping around his chest like a lifejacket several sizes too small, and then the first shivers, small electric touches in his shoulders, beneath the blades, shaking in spite of himself. He heard the car before he saw it, the engine punching through the calm. He pushed himself from the wall of the tower. It was a small red “muscle” car, coming much too quickly from Pineda; the driver hit the brakes and raised a mushroom cloud of sand blown up from the beach. Radu Stelescu wound the window down and smiled. He listened to some kind of wailing dance music with an insistent beat and smiled with every one of his shark's teeth. His hair was tight against his skull. 'Hola!' He shouted, high, 'How much for the night?'

  Marwick ignored what he said. 'Sean says you wanted to see me?'

  'I do, I do,' he sniffed, 'we're going to go for a drive, you and me.' He looked at Marwick for what seemed a long time. The engine growled like an empty stomach and there was a strange knocking sound from somewhere beneath the vehicle. 'So?' 'So what?'

  'Are you going to get the fuck in or what?' The smile dropped and revealed, briefly, the real man behind the eyes.

  Marwick looked left and right and then climbed in. The car was new and had the sharp plastic smell of fresh upholstery; Radu turned to him and gestured towards the seatbelt hanging beside the door. 'Better to be safe than sorry,' he said, removing his glasses and grinning.

  They drove through the country without conversation. Marwick watched the land through his window unreel like a movie: olive trees spaced widely on slopes leading to the mountains; low walls, ochre rocks stacked like stale loaves in slanting light. Marwick held onto himself very tightly as they drove. Radu pulled the car up at a building site. The engine's heat flooded through the car and Radu sighed, 'We are here.' 'Where's here?' 'A place,' Radu said, 'as good as any; they were building a swimming pool here but ran out of money, now it is empty, abandoned.'

  'You're a strange lad, Radu,' Marwick said, sitting very still and looking at the dried cement splashed across the side of a truck and the piled bricks and an excavator like a hulking dinosaur beneath three tall pines that cast a shadow across the scrub. Radu climbed out of the car, motioning for Marwick to do likewise.

  There was a dog barking somewhere and the constant trickling, dreamlike noise of cicadas. Radu walked to the rear of the car, lifted his zippered top at the back and dragged a pistol out of his belt.

  Marwick stared at the pistol as though he didn't know what it was. The loose white shirt blew around his waist in a dry breeze that came across the plain, 'Fuck,' he whispered.

  The young man grinned and held the weapon before him as though testing the weight. The wind was high in the three pines and rustled a plastic bag against the wire fence and it felt to Marwick as though that dry, dead mortuary wind was all that existed now.

  'Beautiful, isn't it,' Radu said, lifting the pistol to his nose and inhaling deeply as though it was a rose, 'it's Russian, a Stechkin; they made these for KGB; it does not jump when you fire; look at this.' He drew a silencer from his pocket. The pistol had a tubular steel nose extending forward from the top slider, to which Radu attached the silencer, doubling the weapon's length, so it hung from his hand, long, shining, looked after,
but an old gun, not quite an antique. Marwick watched as though it was a cobra. 'A range of 25 metres; 3 or 4 rounds a burst in full automatic. I love this gun; it has always been a good friend. You can get a shoulder stock, but I lost it in Sofia, I think, but the silencer?' He smiled. 'Man, I love this gun.'

  'It's very handsome,' Marwick said in a thick voice. His mouth was unbelievably dry; he hadn't known it was possible for a mouth to become so arid.

  'My brother and me,' Radu began, 'have wondered for a long time what happened with the boat, you know; we have had problems because of this, we lost much, and our names are not what they were; people talk; they think we are too stupid to find the thieves, or else too weak to deal with them.' He smiled. 'But I am going to show them how the Stelescu family deals with thieves.'

  'But you don't know who it was.'

  'We know.' He said this with great deliberation, dropping each word into the silence as stones drop into a calm pool of dark water.

  'How?'

  'From Rus.'

  'You paid him?'

  'No, we don't pay.'

  They stood regarding each other through the harsh flaring light flooding from the sunset, and then Radu said, 'So let's do this.'

  Marwick closed his eyes, waited, and heard the metallic accent of the pistol cocking and then Radu opened the boot of the car and Marwick heard a muffled sob and the suspension grinding as the weight it carried shifted. He opened his eyes and saw Radu at the rear of the car, swearing in his own language, then looking over and growling, 'Help me then, motherfucker; I can't lift with one hand.'

  Marwick dashed across, his boot heels crunching in the dust; there was a man, wrists bound behind his back with yellow plasticuffs, a scratchy brown hessian sack that looked damp in places across his face. Radu, holding the man's ankle, had dragged him halfway out of the car with one hand. He gestured with the pistol at the man's other leg and, with a scornful expression, said, 'Get him out of my fucking car.' Marwick pulled the man's leg, lifting him; the man wore trousers that were wetly dark along the front of the thighs and he was sobbing.

  'Quickly,' Radu puffed, his face slick with sweat, leaving the task to Marwick, 'he's pissed his pants and this car is new and I don't want it to stink.' He wiped his face with his sleeve, arm weighted by the pistol. 'I am meeting a girl later.'

  The man fell to his knees in the gravel and Radu stepped across and pulled the sacking from his head as though unveiling a work of art. The man glanced down and then up and his eyes looked as though somebody had rubbed pepper into them. Marwick felt a churning in his stomach and his throat palpated with the rising of his heart. It was Roy Quinn.

  'Buenos tardes,' Radu said, mockingly, 'you piece of shit.'

  There was plumber's tape across Roy's mouth and the edge of it cut against his septum; it was very tight and his cheeks bulged across it; a stream of blood and snot stained the shiny white web of the fabric. Pieces of fluff were stuck into his greasy hair and his red eyes turned to Marwick. He tried to speak through the tape, and Radu hushed him, waving a finger in front of his face. 'I'm not going to take this tape off,' he said. 'I do not like to hear a man beg and cry and pray.' He turned to Marwick. 'You wouldn't beg, would you? You're like me; you wouldn't plead, or pray to gods who are not there. You'd take it.' He nodded, more to himself than anything. 'But this putoi? He'd weep like a woman.'

  'How,' Marwick stammered, ignoring the nausea rampaging through his body, trying not to let a note of fear sound on his tongue, 'how do you know Roy had anything to do with this?'

  'Because he could not keep hold of his tongue,' Radu said, 'because he was too greedy and too foolish; because he hated you, my friend, and had to tell the world that he had struck against you.' Marwick scowled. 'Who says this?'

  'This motherfucker was even on the boat that night,' Radu said, 'he told a woman who told Rus; trying to make himself a man; he was a boxer, in older days, was he not?' Marwick nodded. 'And there was still enough strength in his arm to knock you cold. He told everybody.'

  'I need to hear this from him.'

  'He will only cry again.'

  'Roy?' Marwick kneeled in the dust beside the man, trying not to look into his frightened, streaming eyes. 'Is this true?' Marwick dragged his finger in the dust, carving a shape, idly.

  The young man nodded, struggling to make the motion clear because his head was trembling violently.

  Marwick inhaled slowly and deeply and closed his eyes. He turned to Radu, and said, 'We need to find the others were and maybe we can get back our stuff? I need the other blokes.'

  'We only need this one.'

  'I don't see why.'

  'Because the others are not as stupid as this bastard,' Radu sniffed, 'I have already asked him; he will not say who the others are, or where the cocaine is. What's the matter? Don't you believe me? You think we found the coke and kept it?'

  Marwick turned, angrily. 'Course I don't,' he said. 'So what are you going to do?'

  'This.'

  The crack of the silenced pistol was sharp and pure against the noiseless heaviness of the plain. The back of Roy Quinn's skull came away in a single coughing vomit of bone and scarlet and a crimson vapour showered forward across the white linen of Marwick's shirt; microscopic dots, like spray from a toothbrush, speckled his sleeve.

  Radu hadn't paused to aim, simply lifted his arm and fired.

  It was a good shot, Marwick thought, considering.

  The young man's body fell back into the ditch and a dark pool of blood ran into the powdery dust with unbelievable speed.

  Radu began to unscrew the silencer, gazing down at the body with dark, mournful eyes as he worked at the pistol, then, almost as an afterthought, he walked across and spat on the ground. He swore gently and looked over at Marwick, still on his knees, close to the ditch. The air filled with the rank smell of a body loosing itself, the acidic, copper and open sewer smell of murder.

  Marwick spoke over his shoulder, 'There was no need.'

  'He's dead,' Radu said, 'let's go.'

  'We needed him.'

  'It doesn't matter now,' Radu said, 'leave him to Hell. Come on.' He slapped a hand on Marwick's shoulder. 'I know now we can trust you.'

  Marwick raised his head; his eyes were heavy and he was tired, deeply tired and didn't know if there was strength in his knees to lift him. The red stains across his shirt had started to run into each other and he was aware of it all; the sky, the feel of the earth, the perfume of the settling dust and the pistol, the scrunch of Stelescu's trainers as he walked to the car. As always in the presence of a dead man, he wondered what exactly the world had just lost and felt the strange privilege that embarrassed him always of being for some reason still alive.

  They left Roy where he had fallen; legs twisted, like a broken toy, the dust around him heavy with the drying and congealing blood like the sand in a ring after they have dragged out the dead bull. One leg of his trousers had worked up around his calf and the flesh was harshly pale in the twilight like the skin of a joint of pork; the image barged into Marwick's heart and he could not rid himself of it. His thighs trembled and he did not know how they carried him back to the car. Radu, in already and sat behind the wheel, lit a cigarette and offered one to Marwick, which he took. He sighed, the other man held the gas lighter between them, Marwick leaned forward, and the dried tobacco crackled in the immense quiet of the space between them. 'You don't like that I kill this man?'

  Marwick shrugged. 'I would have liked to talk with him,' he said, 'that is all.'

  'You don't look well, Marwick; I'm surprised.'

  'A bloke doesn't have to get used to it,' Marwick said, quietly, sucking on the cigarette.

  'Let's go,' Radu sounded disappointed, as though he had expected something other, as though a game had been ruined.

  ***

  They drove back into Sant Carles through the new fall of the night and Marwick was dropped off on the Passeig Miramar. Radu tried to smile, but he could not even preten
d at happiness. He left Marwick beside the fishermen's sheds and the working pier and headed at great speed in the direction of Pineda.

  Marwick walked to the edge of the pier, looked out over the boats and heard the jangle of their ties and stays and the wind curling over the ripples of the dark heavy water. He called Sean's mobile. His hands no longer shook, but it was there, at the back of his throat, the shaved steel taste of fear. 'Marwick?' Sean's voice was high, concerned, perhaps even a little shocked. 'What's up? How did it go?'

  'They killed Roy.'

  Silence, then Sean, calmer now, asked 'Who did?'

  'Who do you think?'

  'He's really dead?'

  Marwick walked to the edge and looked down into the water. It was starting to get cold. His shirt was dark and dry now and he stared balefully at the spatter marks as he said, 'Dead as he can be.'

  'Shit,' Sean said, 'where is he right now?'

  'In the backcountry.'

  'Where are you?'

  'Sant Carles, he just dropped me off.'

  Marwick closed his eyes; he needed a drink. Half a dozen men worked on one of the boats close to him, throwing the plastic fish boxes up onto the concrete pier and telling a joke in a flat, musical Catalan.

  Sean, after a pause, said, 'I'm coming to get you; I want you to tell me everything, as it happened.' It sounded as though Sean had the mobile phone jammed against his jaw.

  'There's still this Christie guy.'

  'We'll find him and where they hid our gear. No way could that pinhead shift it. Bunch of amateurs who just got lucky, you only need to get lucky once, Marwick, you know that.'

  'You coming down now?'

  'On me way.'

  'I'm up near the Tourist information place.'

  The phone clicked and fell silent. Marwick leaned against the steel fence surrounding the fish quay and breathed out, slowly and deeply.