Maid of the Mist (22 page)

Popov made a grab for Corrigan's left hand. Corrigan pulled it back as far as he could. Popov giggled.

'Why the fuck would you want to cut one of my fingers off ?'

'I don't
want
to. I
have
to. Business necessity. You fuck my wife, you tell her she great actress, she wanna run off to Hollywood and marry David Hasslefree. That mean you owe me, buster, and all you got damn nothing in your pants and that's not enough. So I ask myself, who will pay to get you back, and there's only one answer, so I cut off your finger and send it to the Old Cripple and say, hey, send me a million and I'll give you the cop.'

'I don't understand the logic of this.'

'Logic? Logic? This isn't no Mr Spock situation, Frank Corrigan. Maybe the Old Cripple pay quick, you get to stitch it back on again. I hear they do great things these days. Do great things in Russia too, stitch it back on the wrong hand. That's Russia for you. Thank God I got out. Do you know how many gangs there are in the Russian Republic alone? I tell you. Five thousand. Too busy, too dangerous. Here, things are just nice. And dandy. But I gotta eat. I gotta wife to keep in the custom to which if it were possible to be it would. I say. So now, to the finger.'

He turned and surveyed the apartment. 'You know, I rent these apartments with furnish, good money, but I never check for knives. Still, not a thing you ask straight out: Mr Landlord, will you provide me with sharp knives for cutting off fingers? OK, let me see.'

He moved into the kitchen and began pulling at drawers. He produced a succession of implements: a ladle, a fork, a potato peeler, then waved a spoon at Corrigan: 'No!' And laughed his gold-tinged laugh. Corrigan strained at the ropes, but succeeded only in jagging his shot arm. He groaned.

He hissed at Lelewala: 'Lelewala!'

But she was still out of it.

'Damn no good!' Popov slammed a drawer shut and slapped his hand on the counter. 'Never a knife when you need one. Maybe I wait until my boys come back; they sort me out with a knife. You met my boys?'

Corrigan nodded.

'Good boys. Growing boys. They've gone to meet Ken.'

'Ken?' Corrigan said weakly.

'Ken Tucky Fried Chicken! Them boys can't do a thing without their food. So tell me about the convention then, sweetie.'

Corrigan took a deep breath. 'What convention?'

Popov stomped across from the kitchen and whacked Corrigan across the face with the spoon. Corrigan saw stars. David Hasselhoff.

'You stupid fuck. I take your whole fucking hand. I cut it off and stick it up your ass and send the whole fucking lot to the Old Cripple and say Happy Christmas.'

He whacked him again. As Corrigan was shaking the pain out of his head Popov turned suddenly and studied his wife. 'It is a great pity. . .' he said, waving the spoon in the air, 'she is so beautiful. . . she is . . . how do you say . . . ?' He clicked the clicking fingers of one hand. 'Horses run free . . .' He looked to Corrigan for assistance. He clicked the fingers again. 'Unstable. It is a great pity. This is the land of the free, is it not? Yet will she ever be free? I think not. How will she ever earn enough money to be free if she act the crazy woman all the time? She owe me, Mr Policeman.'

'She's your wife, for godsake.'

'All the more reason. If you can't trust your wife to pay her debts, who can you trust?'

'How much does she . . . ?'

'One million dollars.'

'That's a lot of. . .'

'That's one hundred thousand for getting her into the great land of the free . . .'

'And nine hundred thousand dollars interest. I get the picture.'

'You want a picture? I can get you pictures of her. Videos too. She very popular. Why not, she very beautiful, but she never going to pay it off if she acts the crazy.'

'How much does she owe you now?'

Popov thought for a moment. 'She hardly scratched my surface. Work it out yourself. Fifty dollars a guy, six guys a day. It gonna take her . . . what you say? Ten years. Plus you gotta take into account the depreciation in her good looks over that period, so maybe you can't charge fifty; maybe forty, maybe thirty towards the end. Fifteen years, maybe. But she pretty good on schedule, then she fucks up a gig and talks lots of Indian shit so I have to throw her in the river. What way is that to pay off your debt? I should cut one-ah her fingers off too, teach her not to . . . but yeah, I know. You can't do that to your wife. Look at her; isn't she beautiful asleep like that, although I had to knock her out? Women, yeah? Always on your back, when they should be on theirs, paying off their debt to my society. So who told you?'

'Who told me what?'

'That I upset about the convention.'

'I never mentioned . . .'

'Well you wrong. I tell you, I like a quiet life. You think I want to get mixed up with those guys? All that shit. No way. I had enough of that in Moscow, I came here to get away with it. They can carve up the world all they like; ain't none of my business. All I want is to be left alone and my million dollars. Pongo owes me that. He ain't got it; the Old Cripple owes me it. What does he do when I ask for it? He tries to kill me. So he's not my friend. And if he's not my friend, you're my enemy. And then suddenly he's my friend again, says if I shut up for a month until convention is over, he'll give me the million. Fair enough.'

'Fair enough,' Corrigan ventured, looking warily at the spoon and desperately towards the door for some sign of assistance.

'Fuck no way!' Popov yelled suddenly. He slammed the spoon against his own leg. 'No one tells Gavril Popov to shut the fuck up for a month! I got clients. I got girls. What's he want, they cross their legs for four weeks? No way. I got customers. I show him how Gavril Popov keeps quiet.'

And then he stopped, looked at Corrigan, and for a moment seemed to consider shutting up, that he'd said too much. But it wasn't possible. 'So, I kill your wife.'

There was nothing Corrigan could do. He was tied securely, he was shot in the arm and the hand, he'd been assaulted with a spoon and he was about to have a finger severed, or even a thumb. There was nothing he could do to this man who had killed Nicola. Nothing except: 'Why?'

'Accident. Of course I did not know then that she was police- man's wife. All I want is to show the Old Cripple that I'm not to be fucked with, only my girls. So, what I do, I pick out the worst guy, the one who hurts my girls the most. He pays top dollar, but he hurts my girls, then says sorry, sorry, like it's all right. So this guy, big, big, fat guy, he phones up, asks for Gretchin. Now she not long outta the Niagara and her brain is all messed up, she don't wanna go, he beat her last time, but I say, you gotta go. She has a lotta money to pay off so she ain't got much choice. I wait in the car outside, I figure if I hear her scream, then I gotta right to teach him a lesson. So I hear her scream and I go in; he's beating on my wife and I shoot the fucker. Except right then his wife arrives home unexpected and sees it all and so I shoot her too. Except I didn't know it was your wife also, and anyway the police are coming and Gretchin she's been knocked about so much she has a fucking fit and she won't move her ass and so I have to leave her. But luckily all she does is talk the turkey anyway, and get off with it, so happy faces all round. Except your wife. Her fat man, not a good fat man at all. Lucky to be rid of him, if she was alive. Explain OK, Mr Policeman?'

Corrigan nodded.

'Good, now I cut off the finger, yeah?'

Madeline's heart was pounding, and it wasn't for Corrigan. It was for the convention. It was for making her name. Corrigan's death – and she was sure he was dead – merely confirmed the importance of it all. And if it was really that big, then Channel 4 in Buffalo just wasn't big enough for the story. It was national. International. It was
Hollywood.

Split the rights?
Certainly.

Show me the contract, buster.

A verbal contract ain't worth the paper it's written on.

A Hollywood quote.

She'd done everything she could. Called the cops, alerted them to the shooting above the pizza shop. Zipped round to Stirling's house. Told them the terrible news about Corrigan. They'd looked at each other helplessly and resolved to destroy the convention.

Stirling's wife, young, trim, under the thumb, was turning out sandwiches for the Magnificent Seven, though they were only six. Morton was teaching them how to use their guns, how to shoot and roll and stab and fight, as if you could do it in half an hour. And she was getting it all on video without their realizing. She'd seen
The Magnificent Seven
as a kid, so she knew the possibilities; Yul Brynner had turned a bunch of dozy Mexicans into an efficient fighting force, although admittedly there had been one hell of a lot of them,
and
they'd been defending, not attacking.

A window exploded to her left and she let out a scream. Then the seventy-year-old, Paddy Crossen, grinned sheepishly across and apologized by waving the gun cheerily in his hand. Another shot went off and the Magnificent Six were diving for cover.

They would die.

There would be a record of it. A tribute to their bravery. But not without more videotape.

She made her excuses and drove back into town to pick up some more tape. What she really needed to pick up was a cameraman, then she could send him in with the elite fighting force and maybe just pick the tape up off his body afterwards if he didn't make it. But if he did, it would mean he'd make a claim for a share of the profits, so she resolved to do it all herself. Awards, fame, Hollywood,
money.

She wasn't really a mercenary, she was just ambitious.

She wasn't really heartless, she'd just been hurt in the past.

And if she was pushed she'd probably admit to a girlfriend that she really fancied Frank Corrigan, but he was probably dead, so what could she do about that except produce this film as a fitting tribute to him?

She tutted and slapped the steering wheel. All these thoughts. Adrenaline. Keep calm. You're taking a risk. You'll probably get fired. Or arrested. But go for it. Make your mark.

She looked at the houses. The cars. The taxis. The conventioneers were in town, staying in private villas or luxurious hotel suites, carving up territories, making shipping arrangements, drawing up hit-lists, sealing rifts, promoting designer drugs, designing designer drugs, doing drugs, stealing drugs, planning to do and steal drugs. She'd seen some of them herself, sitting in the car with Morton while he snapped away and she resolved to steal his film.

Like Waldo Aponte Romero walking across the tarmac at Niagara Regional Airport, his Lear jet parked behind him, his flowered shirt hiding bullet and knife scars and his broad smile hiding the viciousness that went hand in hand with his high rank in the Medellin drug cartel.

Or Giuseppe Lottusi, bald, beefy, weighed down with gold chains, standing at the head of a chartered Greyhound bus, instructing the members of four Mafia families to relax, enjoy the convention but not to take no fucking prisoners if it came to it.

Or former Politburo member Geidar Aliev, head of the petroleum mafia, the fishing mafia, the fruit-and-vegetable mafia, the caviar mafia, and for the purposes of this trip, the export mafia, all in Azerbaijan, standing fuming in the lobby of the Skylon Brock hotel because his rooms were double-booked.

Or Chiang Kai Smith, the former Hong Kong Triad assassin, now domiciled in New York, coming by taxi with his three brothers because they could afford to
and
give a tip, bringing with them big plans to shake up the Koreans. Morton, for so long out of circulation, seemed to know it all and took an obvious pleasure in telling her. Maybe he was trying to scare her. If he was, he failed. It excited her. It was all she could do to stop herself going up to Chiang Kai Smith with her camera and saying, 'Welcome to Niagara Falls. How's the drugs business?'

So many angles. So many stories. So much money.

Her route to the camera store took her past the pizza shop where Corrigan had been shot, and she peered across, wondering what was going on outside it. There were people standing in a circle, watching something. She slowed, tried to see; there were two people on the ground. Fighting. Or at least one of them was. They were . . . both women. The girl from the pizza shop. Fighting again. She tutted and parked the car and hurried across for a closer look, positioning the lens of the video camera out of the little gap in her handbag so she wouldn't miss a thing.

She was just in time to meet the Big Circle Boys.

They'd made the short drive down from Toronto, expecting to pick up a cheap motel room or four, but were having some trouble. They weren't A list, making their money mostly as sewer rats – transporting illegal aliens – or from smuggling heroin across the border into New York – so they didn't qualify for complimentary rooms at any of the better hotels. They didn't even have direct invitations to the convention, but were hoping to blag their way in to one or other of the many fringe meetings taking place around town.

They'd started out as Red Guards a generation before, bright young soldiers who'd been purged by the People's Liberation Army and treated like hardened criminals, and as a consequence they'd become hardened criminals. Smuggled into Hong Kong and then to Canada, they'd made their name through a series of violent armed robberies in the mid-seventies. Now they were trying to move a little further up market. Instead of buying from a local wholesaler, they wanted to buy direct from the Golden Triangle of Laos, Burma and Thailand. They were sure if they just got to meet the Old Cripple he could arrange this for them.

But every room in town was taken and they were a little upset. Cheng Chui-Ping especially. Even bloodthirsty Chinese women gangsters get period pains. She was fed up tramping from one dive to the next, and she was cramping. So she led her men down Clifton Hill in a blind fury and came across the pizza shop. She thought maybe food might help with the pain and tried to place an order, but the young girl behind the counter said they were closed. In fact, the place looked like it was permanently closed. Of course she didn't know that upstairs there was a bullet hole and Corrigan's bloodstains on the floor. Cheng Chui-Ping demanded to see the manager, her demand was refused. The girl was pulled out from behind the counter and chopped. She ran screaming out on to the sidewalk, and people stopped to watch as she got chopped again. She tried to scramble away but the Big Circle Boys wouldn't let her go. The blows kept raining down. Cheng Chui-Ping was enjoying herself now and her boys were laughing.