One of Us (11 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I took Sean to see Elena. If he was going to help, it was important that they knew each other, and important that Elena could trust him. At the first meeting, that seemed a long way off. Elena stared at him like one cat stares at another when they are about to fight, and then she hid herself behind a smokescreen while I sat and tried to keep the conversation going, and Sean made awkward attempts to show that he was not a man just like all the others who used Elena. We sat in Elena’s room, Sean and I on the couch, Elena perched on the edge of her bed, ashtray on her knee.

“I don’t know about this,” Elena said. “Too many people, someone talks.”

“There are only the three of us,” I said.

She shrugged. “Three’s enough. What if
he
talks?”

“He won’t talk.”

“Um, I am here, you know,” Sean said.

Elena ignored him. “It is my life at risk,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “And if you do nothing, go on as before?”

Elena blew out a stream of smoke towards me, and looked away.

“If you really don’t want me to be involved,” Sean said to her in a gentle voice, “I won’t be. But I do want to help.”

“Why?” The suspicion was plain in her voice. “What do you get? You help me, then I fuck you maybe, is that it?”

Sean looked as if he had been slapped in the face.

“Elena,” I said, angry. “That is not fair. He is not like them.”

“That is what their wives think too,” Elena said.

“Look,” Sean said, raising his voice. “Will both of you stop talking as if I’m not here? You included, Anna, I can speak for myself. Listen, Elena, I know what you must think of all men, but it’s not like that. You want me to be blunt, I’m not even here for you. I mean, I’m really sorry for everything that’s going on, it’s disgusting, it’s terrible, and I’ll do what I can to help, but you want a straight answer, I’m not here because I want anything from you, I’m here because of Anna.”

“Ah,” Elena said, and her eyes lit up. “Now I understand.” She winked at me, crossed her legs, and mashed her cigarette into the ashtray with one hand, shaking her packet of cigarettes with the other so she could get at a fresh one. “I am sorry, Sean. Now I understand.” She looked amused.

“No,” Sean said in despair. “No you’ve—look—Anna’s my friend.”

“Uh-huh,” Elena said, swinging one foot backward and forward, her shoe dangling from her toes. Sean looked down at her legs, looked away, then back again, as if he had no choice in the matter. Men.

“She is. I’m helping out a friend. People do that, you know.”

“Sure they do.” She lit her new cigarette.

“For Christ’s sake, tell her, Anna,” he appealed.

I nodded. “Like he said. Sean is a very good friend to me.” Elena gave me a look. I gave her one back. She nodded, smiled.

“OK,” she said. “Very good friends, that is all. Fine. I understand.”

And with that, the ice in the room was broken. But all the rest of the time that we were there, Elena kept giving me the occasional look as if we were conspirators in some plot. I did not know if Sean noticed, and I did not do much to make her think anything else, because if it made her more trusting of Sean, then it was worth it. A couple of times though, while we were talking, I knew that if I looked across I would have seen Sean, looking at me, as if he was thinking about something. But I did not look across, because I did not want to find out that I was right, or to see him suddenly looking away, a flush in his cheeks.

We drank Elena’s terrible coffee and we talked about what we could do. Elena did not care about detail, and kept coming back to what her new life in Canada with her boy would be like. Sean worried about practicalities, about how and what and the evidence. I thought to myself that Lomax might just take the recording from me, and laugh at my asking for money. He would be a man like Corgan, and they do what they want. There was no point in us doing this if it ended up with no gain for us, and Corgan knowing that he had been betrayed. But then we did not want to not do this, and just leave Elena to the men who hurt her. I kept all of these thoughts close in to myself.

It grew close to the time when Sean and I had to be in work.

“Meet round here again?” I said. “Two days time. Until then, we think things over, make sure we have this right.

“What’s to stop this Lomax just taking the recording?” Sean asked. “Thank you very much, now hand it over and piss off before I shoot you in the face.”

“We get the money first,” I said. “Only then, we give it to him.”

“And if he makes us tell him where it is?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, “and if we get run over by a car on the way there or if Corgan chooses that day to blow Lomax up with a bomb or the ice caps melt and we are all swept away, then it will all go wrong too. What more can we do, Sean? Give up?”

“I didn’t mean—no. Look, I’m just trying to think it through, cover all the angles.” He made a sorry face. I made an annoyed one, just for the fun of seeing what it would make him do, but then I felt that I was being a bad girl, so I relented.

“I know. There is a danger in what we do. But then if we do nothing...”

Sean nodded. Elena said nothing. I do not know if she had not followed what we had said, or if she did not care. For her, just living was a risk.

“I will try and find out more about this Lomax,” I said. “Where I can find him, for one thing.”

“How you going to do that?” Sean said. “Not like he’ll be in the Yellow Pages under Gangster, is it?”

“Daniel will know,” I said.

You would think that I had just pissed on the floor.

“What?” I said.

Elena just snorted and looked away. Sean looked angry. “No way should you go near him,” he said. “He’s one of them.”

“He’s not,” I said.

“Their puppy dog,” Elena said.

“You don’t know him,” I said. “There’s more to him than that.”

“Oh,” Elena said, and gave me another knowing look. Sean just looked as if he wanted to spit on the floor.

“I am serious,” I said. “You know, he hates Corgan too, the way he is treated. He does not want to be part of what they do. I had thought that we could bring him in—”

“No fucking way,” Sean said, and stood up. “No fucking way.”

“What he said,” Elena said. “I do not trust Daniel.”

I was cross with both of them. They only saw the outside Daniel, and had not seen what I had seen. And with Sean, much of it was macho bullshit, two elk butting horns in the woods. But I could see that there would be no changing their mind about him.

“Have it your way,” I said, and then I took a breath so that in my next words I would sound less of a sulking child. “He is the only way I know to find where Lomax is though.” The breath hadn’t helped.

“You can’t tell him why,” Sean said.

“I will not. But I must use him to find out about Lomax, we have no choice in that.”

“If there’s no better way,” Sean said. “But go careful, for God’s sake. Don’t give him a sniff that there’s anything happening.”

“Am I stupid?” I said to him. “Am I wearing a hat with stupid written on it?”

Normally Sean would back down when I got like that, but this time he just shrugged, and would not look me in the eye. Elena grinned, and said, “I am sure you can get Daniel to tell you all he knows, Anna,” and then it was my turn to glare at her.

“Tell you what,” Sean said, when we had been quiet long enough that saying anything was better than staying silent. “I get paid tomorrow. Let’s meet up at Café Roma, down on Wyatt Street near the monument, my shout. At least we’ll get a decent cup of coffee.” I hit him in the arm with my elbow when Elena was not looking. “Um, not saying that...just they do good coffee, cakes too. Be a treat for us, think we could do with it.”

“Oh yeah,” Elena said. “Nice treat, makes all the bad things go away.”

Sean looked at me with an appeal in his eyes. He was trying his best. I shrugged.

“Back here then,” Sean said.

“No way,” Elena said. “I want fucking cake.”

~

“This is nice,” I said.

“What, the place, the wine, or being with me?” Daniel asked. We were sat in a bar, and I had a glass of wine that was so big I was scared at first to lift it in case I hurt my back. It was not a bar for people like me. Or rather, not a bar for the person I was now. Most of the women in there wore suits that looked like they cost more than I earned in a month. They looked as if they had just come from a hard day making big deals, and now they wanted to relax with drinks that were all the colours of the rainbow, and with their boyfriends who drank from bottles while playing with their iPhones. Everything was shiny chrome and glass, and everyone was there to look at everyone else. Once, in bars like this, they looked at me.

“Oh, the wine,” I said. “Definitely the wine.”

Daniel pouted and pretended to ignore me for a little while. I let him, while I drank my wine, and wondered how I was going to steer the conversation the way I wanted it to go.

“Maybe you can explain something to me,” I said, “something I do not understand.” I looked out at the people in the bar, not at Daniel. A woman got up from where she was sitting with a man who had been buying her drinks since we had been in the bar, three drinks to our one. She walked out to the toilets as if the floor of the bar was sloping. As soon as she had turned her back, the man turned to watch a group of women who were sitting further along the bar from us. I frowned at him, because he hadn’t even waited for the woman he was with to leave the room before he eyed up the others, and because he had not even looked at me. “Corgan and this man Lomax, they do the same thing? Is this why they are rivals?”

“Tsss,” Daniel rolled his eyes. “Not here to talk about work, are we? And anyway, less you know about stuff like that the better.”

I shook my head. “I want to know who I work for, what I am mixed up in.”

“Nah, you don’t.”

“More to the point, what
you
got me mixed up in.”

Daniel sighed. “Never going to leave that, are you?”

“Perhaps. If you answer my question.”

“Yeah, right.” He took a long drink from his bottle, and then seemed to come to some kind of decision. “It’s not that complicated. At the far end, the Ukrainian’s contacts get the girls interested. Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovakia, all over. Lomax runs them in. Breaks them in, know what I mean. Corgan’s end of things is here, keeps a few of the girls working for him, but mostly arranges for them to be passed on, not just here, all over. He is like a broker, really.”

“So they each want to take over from the other?”

“Yeah. Ukrainian keeps ’em divided, no-one getting too powerful, getting ideas above their station. Always the threat of being replaced by the other guy. Keeps them on their toes. But Corgan, he doesn’t want that. Lomax won’t like it too much, but I don’t think he’s got the bottle to take Corgan on. He’s just hoping Corgan’ll make a mistake, and the Ukrainian will uh, retire him. Though if Lomax thinks that means he’d end up with it all, he’s crazy. The Ukrainian would just find another Corgan.”

“This Lomax, he lives here too?”

Daniel looked at me. “Planning on paying him a visit?”

I tried to look as bored as I could. “Yeah, sure. I am going to see him and offer him a free bacon and cheeseburger if he shoots Corgan in the head. Maybe supersize his lemonade for him too.”

Daniel did not laugh. “Don’t do anything stupid, Anna.”

“It is much too late for that.”

“You’re out of your depth,” he said. “What are you asking all this for, Anna, what’s going on inside that gorgeous head of yours?”

I gave a big shrug. “Just curious,” I said. “That’s all. I am mixed up in all this shit, and I need to know who is who so I do not get caught in the crossfire.” I could not push any more. Daniel was already suspicious. I circled the last of my wine around in my glass and then drank it.

Daniel took the hint. “Another drink?”

“I thought you would never ask,” I said. “I thought you were looking after me? Now, tell me again this story about when you went to Turkey. And this time try and make it make sense.”

We spent the rest of the evening with Daniel telling me about Daniel. But he was funny, and had a lot of stories, and it was not a bad way to pass the time. Even if most of the stories were made up.

We had to end the evening early, because Daniel had to be somewhere for nine that evening. “Meeting a friend,” he said. “Long-standing thing, sorry. I’d rather be here to be honest.”

“Is she pretty?” I asked.

He laughed, but did not answer. “Taxi rank, round the corner,” he said.

“I am fine, I will walk,” I said. I could not have afforded a bus, let alone a taxi.

“Bollocks you will,” he said. “My treat.”

“Daniel, you have bought me drinks all evening.” I had protested once, early on. But not much.

“And?” he said. “My choice.”

“I know. I just feel...I do not know.”

“Relax, enjoy being treated how you ought to be.”

We reached the taxi rank, and Daniel looked more serious for a moment, as if he was trying to decide something. Then he nodded.

“Because I know you’ll never leave me the fuck alone until I do tell you,” he said. “And also, well, I like to be in your good books. Know what I mean? Because of that, I’ll tell you two things. But I want a promise in return.”

“I won’t promise until you tell me what it is,” I said.

“I never thought you’d say anything different,” he said. “But I want the promise first. Promise me you’ll go nowhere near Lomax. Promise me.”

I did not want to lie to Daniel.

“I promise,” I said. We can’t always do what we want. “I am in enough shit with Corgan, the last thing I need is to be involved with another bastard like him. Don’t tell me if you are bothered, it’s really not important.”

“Promise?”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t tell me, just forget it.”

“Promise.”

“OK, OK, I promise.” I didn’t even cross my fingers. In case he saw.

“He’s got a few businesses. Runs a travel agents, the one down on Market Square, you know it? Got a stake in a haulage firm too. But he’s also got a club, Shanahan’s. Fuck kind of name is that? Always used to be the Eclipse when I was a kid. Anyway, that’s where he’s based. Was out the back of that Kav got shot, because he was trying to get in where he shouldn’t. But listen to me: stay away. You hear?”