Chapter 12
It was early the next morning when someone knocked on the front door.
“What the fuck happened to you?” I opened to see Patrick drenched in blood, nose, lips, and god-knows-what-else broken.
“He knows. He knows,” he stumbled in.
I stepped out, looked round for anyone who may have been following him, and stepped back in, shutting the door behind me.
“George!” I called for help
“I tried…” he fell to the floor.
“Tried what?” I knelt beside him, “George! I need you down here!”
“Now he won’t wait. I wanted to come before he came, to warn you.”
“But he found you first, didn’t he?”
He was coughing blood all over me while I tried to pull him up.
“What is all this shouting?” Sayer came, trailing behind George.
“Help me get him to the bathroom.”
George picked him up by the shoulders with ease and dragged him into the nearest bathroom, where I helped clean some of the blood off his face. Once his features could be seen, we helped him into the study.
“Take these,” I gave him some pills and a glass of water.
He gulped the pills down, holding the glass between his shaking hands.
“You better start explaining, boy,” Sayer was standing at the door, imposing his presence over the situation.
Patrick turned to me with a questioning look.
“He knows,” I encouraged him to talk, “they both know what I am.”
“He’s coming for her,” his eyes flashed from me to George to Sayer. “He wants to abduct her during the service.”
“How much time do we have?” Sayer asked George.
“A little over twenty-four hours.”
I kept staring at Patrick, noticing how much he was trembling.
“Scarlett, help him change into clean clothes and make sure he eats something while George and I decide what to do.”
“OK.”
They both went into Sayer’s office and locked themselves in. I took Patrick to my room so he could take a shower, gave him some clothes to change into, and helped him to a cup of coffee and a plate of hot breakfast at the kitchen bar.
“Thank you,” he sipped the coffee. “This is good.”
“If he let you live,” I poured myself a cup too, “it is because he wanted you to come here and warn us.” I heard him choke.
“I managed to make it out through a window in my flat. Danny and Mike didn’t.”
“Those were your two guys?”
“Yes. There’s blood all over the place.”
“George does a splendid job cleaning up that sort of thing. If we make it out of this alive, that is.”
“We will,” he said matter-of-factly. “Do you love Sayer?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you in love with him? I heard MacGowan say that…” he paused, pondering whether to proceed or not, until I nodded him on, “that Sayer’s gone soft with old age and has fallen for you. That he was always the hopeless romantic, and that it made him weak.”
“Is that so?” I sipped on my own coffee. “Well, he’s a man, after all.”
“He’s a good man, ain’t he? I mean, he’s a nice person.”
“He is.”
“You must know all about him, being a cop.”
“I do, and you remind me a lot of him when he was young. I’ve been listening about him all my life, how different he was from the rest of the drug dealers. He didn’t come from an underprivileged family, he didn’t have a rough childhood. He just saw a business opportunity and took it seriously enough to become the man he is now.” I turned and looked into his sparkly eyes, “not that he wasn’t a ruthless cunt in the beginning. It’s the only way to get to the top and stay there for as long as he has. You have the potential. You just have to work on the ‘ruthless cunt’ part.”
He went back to his breakfast without speaking again.
I finished my coffee and walked out of the kitchen to find Sayer and George in the corridor.
“Can you call Moretti?” Sayer asked me the moment he saw me.
“You know Romulus?”
“Can you tell him I want to meet with him today? We need to talk before the funeral.”
Why I was flabbergasted by this, I do not know. I should have known, or should have supposed, that Sayer knew Moretti, same as I should have supposed he knew I was an undercover since the beginning.
I was feeling smaller by the minute as I spoke to Moretti on the phone. He accepted the invitation and, an hour later, he was standing at the door. George patted him down and Sayer led the way to his office.
“I believe this isn’t your idea of a meeting with a drug lord, Mr. Moretti.”
“Not at all, Sayer,” he kept glancing at me as we made our way to the office, “not at all.”
“I’m surprised you managed to repress the instinct to bring your gun with you, or a pair of handcuffs.”
George held the office door open for us. Patrick didn’t join us. We left him in my room, resting, hidden from Romulus.
“Would you like something to drink? Tea? Coffee?” Sayer kept a smile on his face as he sat at his desk.
“No, thank you,” Romulus wasn’t comfortable, we could all tell.
“Sit down, please,” Sayer addressed both of us now. “George, stay by the door in case anything happens. This conversation won’t be too long anyway.”
“Cut the crap, Sayer. Tell me what is it you want.”
Sayer raised both eyebrows, curved his mouth downward, put his elbows on the desk, “OK, let’s see. You are acquainted with agent Lang here and how her life is at risk after the murder of another agent and one of your informers,” he paused to observe Romulus stirring on his seat. “And I believe you are also familiar with Max MacGowan.”
“Yes, and yes.”
“I have been informed that the murder of my sister, Cisneros, Tejera and the fourth person was perpetrated by young men under the orders of MacGowan. These young men, to call them something, are underage kids scouted from different estates by MacGowan’s men. This, as you should well know by now, makes me very angry. I don’t condone the corruption of minors, much less make murderers of them by way of threats.”
“Your point?”
“I’m willing to give you MacGowan if you let me keep agent Lang safe.”
Every time he referred to me as ‘agent Lang’ the hairs on my arms stood on ends.
“This is a waste of time,” Romulus jumped to his feet and we all followed. “We will ensure agent Lang’s safety ourselves.”
Sayer strode around the desk. “You’re not getting it, are you? You are on to get MacGowan, I reckon that. The thing is, you won’t have evidence enough to put him in jail for more than, say, two, three years. And that isn’t what you want. I want out, I want to retire at last. You want to put a big time drug dealer behind bars and have your peers love you for it. It’s a win-win situation.”
“Let me get this straight,” Romulus stood, one hand akimbo while the other pointed a finger at Sayer. “You want to give us MacGowan in exchange for retirement?”
“You forget agent Lang.”
“And you want to keep agent Lang,” he glanced at me, but I avoided his eyes. “Why do you want to keep her?”
“She’s a great caregiver and I don’t know what will become of me without her. I tend to forget my meds, eat what I shouldn’t. She even convinced me of getting this cane and now I carry it everywhere I go. She’s cared for me brilliantly.”
Romulus stared hard into Sayer’s eyes. It was a thing of power, yet none of them yielded.
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“How much is it?”
“How much is what?”
“For your thoughts, how much money do you need?”
“Who do you take me for?”
“Everybody has a price, you just have to tell me yours and I will gladly give it
to you. Or should I remind you of that incident back in ’78? You were a Metropolitan Police officer back then. That shooting in Clapham, the young woman you mistook for a robber fleeing the scene, but was only trying to save herself and her boyfriend from the bullets. Do you remember that? Because I have someone here that remembers it clearly.”
Romulus had no answer for that. Well, he did, only that it wasn’t spoken. All he did was turn pale. I didn’t know what Sayer was talking about until I got a glimpse of George’s tight jaw and hands closed into fists.
Holy. Crap.
“A lost bullet,” Sayer proceeded, “out of one of the robbers’ guns, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
“And as such it shall remain. My sister’s funeral is tomorrow. I don’t know about Cisneros’s family, but we’ll let you know,” he touched Romulus’ shoulder. “Be there and you’ll have your man.”
When Romulus turned to leave, George cut him off and stared him down before opening the door for him.
I couldn’t get my mind straight. All of a sudden there were all these things I didn’t know, it made me feel ignorant, and very, very small.
“Calm down,” Sayer joined me in the backyard, where I was trying to get some air, “everything will be OK.”
“I didn’t know you knew Moretti that well,” I shifted to give him space on the bench to sit next to me.
“Neither did I. It was George who told me about him.”
“And to think he hated my guts.”
He chuckled, draped an arm over my shoulders, and kissed my temple. “Don’t go thinking he likes the idea of having an undercover in the house. He respects my feelings, that is all.”
“I handed in my badge when I learned I was being pulled out,” I turned my head to face him. “I didn’t want to leave you.”
“There will be no need to. Once they take MacGowan, I’m out too, and we can be free to go wherever we want and have some peace and quiet at last.”
“Where will we go?”
“I was thinking of going to Tuscany. Would that be too quiet for you?”
“Maybe,” I pressed my lips to his, “or maybe we can shoot stuff in the backyard and nobody will hear us.”
He kissed me back, drew me closer, and hugged me until I leaned my head on his chest and stayed there.
“Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to give up your old chum Max?”
“We’ve been through a lot all these years, yet I can’t deny he’s a greedy pig. Always been. Not satisfied with drugs, he went on to deal with weapons, which I never liked. That is why I never joined him in that venture. He couldn’t hang on to a wife. He needed many birds around him, another thing we disagreed on. And now this; using kids. First, they do sloppy jobs, and, most important, they’re minors. Every single person that has worked for me has been of legal age and completely conscious of what they’re getting into. Every kid wants to be a gangster now, but that doesn’t mean you are going to give them a gun at sixteen and send them out to kill people.”
“But,” I pulled away from him, “the ones that got in here were in their twenties.”
“Still, the one you talked to said he was acting under threat.”
I kept thinking I was missing something, that there was more that I wasn’t aware of. The same thought that had been in my mind since Ferdinand’s death. Then our eyes locked, and all I could think of was how much I wanted for everything to stay this way.
That night we did have sex. Soft, sweet, the tomorrow-the-world-might-end-so-let’s-make-it-special kind of sex.
As if we knew what destiny had designed for us.