‘The taxi driver knew how to find you.’
‘Yeah?’ Michael rotated the joint so it burnt evenly, letting the smoke play around his lips, alternately folding and unfolding the blueish wisps with his pouting lower lip. The ash lay piled on a plate on his knee, among the remains of his goat curry. He didn’t seem to have registered anything she’d said; the implied question, why are you so close to the Pakis?
He took another drag on his joint and held the smoke in his lungs. When he spoke his words were flattened, without the breath to round them out. ‘What’s this cabbie call himself?’
So, he had been listening. Estela tried to recall the man’s name. ‘Anjit?’
‘Yeah, sweet.’ Michael let the smoke flow across his lower lip, vacuuming it back like a waterfall trick-filmed in reverse. ‘Amjad, yeah. He’s all right. I met him through one of his cousins.’
Michael had style, but it was pure street style. Estela could not tell if he was reformed. He had never stopped dealing. He still had a pusher’s insouciant front, with dark hints of reverse-side violence. She needed to know how Michael fitted into her astral scheme, the salad that fate had tossed together for her return to Manchester. Nothing was ever clear or straight when it came to destiny; fate could never keep a clean house.
Estela wondered how this would play: ‘You are pushing heroin?’
‘No fucking way.’
Why should she believe him? ‘But the Pakistanis are still bringing it into Manchester. I know it’s true. Why else would a couple of brothers machine gun that curry house? You can read all about it in the Evening News.’
‘I don’t read the paper, but I know Jabhar’s place was hit. Yeah, some Pakis are bringing in heroin. Instead of the mafia or the triads or shit, Manchester’s got its own independent trade routes. The golden triangle: Manchester, Bradford, Karachi. Pakis smuggle it over, niggers sell it. Whitey buy it. Sweet – but I’ve got nothing to do with it, and neither’s Amjad.’
‘How do you know Amjad’s cousin, then?’
Michael’s smile returned. She would not believe this. ‘He’s a top clothes designer – I’m going to be his super model.’ Michael spun out the last words with a cute babyish stress that made it sound like ‘Mo-khul’.
She arched a plucked eyebrow. ‘Yeah? A catwalk queen?’
‘You don’t catch me mincing. I walk out like a man, maybe swing my butt a little for the ladies.’
Michael snuffed his joint at the roach and flourished a new skin from his Rizla pack, rolling the new joint as he spoke. ‘You should see me on the catwalk, super-fucking-fit. Amjad’s cousin is down with the seventies style: tight tanktops, Oxford bags and leather ankle coats. Also some terrace gear but that’s more eighties. Old skool style, burgundy jumbo cords and crew necks. I’m a natural for it all.’
‘So you started trading on your hooligan past?’
Michael shook his head. ‘I was no hooligan, or not to everyone. You remember what it was like back then. It wasn’t only the boneheads who sang ‘Hey ho the lights are flashing, we’re going Paki-bashing.’ You could hear kids too young to even understand it, singing it in the playgrounds. We stopped that, we almost stopped it on the terraces. Why shouldn’t he ask me to model the stuff – I’m proud of those days.’
Estela said, ‘You built unity. And now brothers are shooting at Pakis with machine guns.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Michael trailed off to end with a shrug. He licked down the last insecure edge of a newly rolled spliff and lit up.
‘You know who attacked the restaurant?’
Michael nodded, sure.
Estela waited, but he was not saying. ‘Why ask me? Go ask your friend Junk – he gets his gear from those guys.’
‘Junk’s using smack?’
‘Not smack. They don’t just deal in heroin. Not enough profit, now heroin is strictly a minority taste. Mostly they’re pushing coke, or crack. Junk gets his before it’s gone in the microwave.’
Estela had not wanted to believe Junk could turn to heroin; that his moods were so dangerous they needed that kind of tranquillisation. But she knew why he bought coke. ‘Junk’s clean. He buys the coke for Burgess. He either runs errands for the boss or he waves goodbye to his job.’
‘It’s for Burgess? I didn’t know that, I thought the bastard had gone straight.’
‘He’s given up manufacturing, I doubt that he’s straight. I know he’s got himself a coke problem he prefers to keep quiet.’
‘If it’s not a business to Burgess, it is to Junk. He isn’t buying the coke, he’s trading it for speed. Eighty per cent pure amphetamine sulphate. The same mix we used to push.’
Eighty per cent pure, that was too close to the old recipe and despite his appetite for the stuff, Junk had never learnt to manufacture it.
‘How can Junk have got access to such high-quality gear?’
Michael had his suspicions. ‘It’s almost like he’s still sitting on the last consignment, the stuff the police never found.’
Estela remembered a chest freezer stored in a rundown factory on the outskirts of Rochdale. She remembered the look on Junk’s face when he opened the lid and saw the bluey-white sulphate packed almost to the rim. She’d had to hold on to him, otherwise he would certainly have dived forward. His mouth was already open, gulping for a taste. Junk was quite mad by then; explicitly, officially insane. The night they were arrested, she’d been put in the holding cell next to his. All night, she listened as he threw himself against the walls. For eight hours, he had raged solidly, thumping against the tiles.
Estela had been on her way to meet Burgess when the police picked her up. The van overtook her on Corporation Street. She had no hope of running, tottering along on stiletto heels in a red kimono and a Debbie Harry wig. When they hauled her to the station, Junk was already there. She wasn’t told. She could hear him, screaming at the end of a cold corridor.
She was made to stand at a desk and watch as the duty sergeant catalogued her belongings; all her bits and pieces, the shoes and the wig, the stockings that could be used in a suicide attempt and so couldn’t be allowed to remain on. Finally, the sergeant came to Burgess’s money: three thousand twenty-pound notes, packed like four slightly ruffled Jackie Collins paperbacks at the bottom of her bag. He counted each note, painfully precise as Junk roared and gibbered in the background. Estela tried to tell him ‘The man needs a doctor.’ The sergeant just leered at her. The same sergeant that almost twisted her balls off during a body search. He said he had to check everything, just for the record. Her testicles remained swollen during the whole of her first week in Risley remand centre.
The money was the only evidence the police ever found; the drugs were gone. It was certain Burgess never once suspected Junk of stealing them. Junk may have been mad enough to try, but was much too mad to succeed. He would have died in the attempt; they would have found him where he landed, headlong in the freezer, legs rigid in the air and his head encased, dead by misadventure. It was inconceivable that a long-time speedhead like Junk could be peddling it, years later, a few ounces every week. If Burgess had the vaguest hint, he would bury Junk himself. He would stuff every orifice with sulphate and leave Junk to explode.
Michael put down his joint and took a square look at her eyes. He said, ‘You’ve come back for Burgess, haven’t you? That’s why you want a gun.’
Junk had thought the very same thing. But it wasn’t true. She had no idea who she was going to kill when she arrived in Manchester. Estela sifted her few words carefully. ‘It wasn’t my intention. It just appears that killing him has got tied in with my destiny.’
‘Yeah, right.’ There was a sarcastic underbite. ‘It’s not like I want to stand in the way of destiny.’
Michael stood and turned to her; the bite had gone. ‘I say the bastard deserves to die for what he did to you. I’ve got a gun. If you take it – you can follow whatever star you like.’
Estela nodded her thanks. Michael left the room and she reached inside her bag for her compact, intending to spend some quality time with her cosmetics, maybe remind herself how much someone could change in twelve years. Instead, her hand closed around the plastic tampon case. The bullets were still inside. Why ever she had kept them, she did not know. They could only tie her in with a lost Beretta, tagged as evidence and sitting on a shelf in the basement of some police station.
She dug deeper and found the compact. Flipping open the lid, her face shone out of the convex mirror – oh baby, baby, baby. There was a woman. She stroked her lips with a brush dipped in mocha rouge and trimmed the edges with a soft chocolate pencil.
She was not designed for prison. Her friends, her contacts, her reputation, they had all protected her during the short prison days. Nothing could protect her at night when she lay awake, freezing under a single blanket as the wind sliced through the glassless window, heaving on the smells of shit and piss that stuck to Risley, shrinking into a narrow slit of depression. Wearing Y-fronts that fifty men had worn before her.
Michael and Junk both expected her to kill Burgess, but neither of them knew for sure what happened that last night, the very last time she and Burgess met. And the indirect ironic cold fact was that Burgess had kept her alive. She had been able to bear her time on remand only because she knew Burgess would have to get her out.
On the journey back to Risley, after her second preliminary appearance at court, the prison van was caught in traffic. Estela sat slumped inside, back to the tin wall, cuffed hands squeezed between her thighs so she didn’t have to see the bracelets or the chain. Her head down so she wouldn’t have to look at the prison officer facing her. When the van lurched into the air she was thrown forward. Even then, although she couldn’t know for sure that this was her moment, her great escape, she butted the officer cold.
She must have been three feet above the Salford pavement when the back doors popped their hinges and the van crashed to earth. Michael Cross was waiting for her. He wore a stocking over his head but was grinning beneath it. She was in tears.
It had been Michael’s idea to sandwich the van between two breaker trucks and use their tow cranes to rip it apart. His boys threw one chain through the van’s windscreen; they attached the other to the back doors. When the trucks drove in opposite directions, the van swung wildly in the air until its back doors gave way.
Estela felt like Cool Hand Lucretia, stepping into her rescuer’s arms wearing prison uniform, brown denim jacket and jeans. Michael had a three-litre Capri waiting (the most stupid touch, too flash and too frequently stolen to blend into the early evening traffic). He hid her until it was safe for her to meet Burgess. She found him in his new club, a cramped shebeen the police had not yet discovered.
She was still working on her lips when Michael came back in the room. He caught her puckering out of a tingling, squealing, long lipstick suck that gave the rouge a pre-worn veneer.
‘You’re dead beau-khiful you, are you a mo-khul?’
Estela turned, smiling up at the joke voice. The smile rounded off to a gasp when she saw what he had in his hand: ‘Jesus-Maria, the sweet fuck’s that?’
Michael was carrying a preposterous handgun. Clutched at his side, it hung halfway down his thigh.
‘I don’t know. Some kind of fuck-off gat.’ He slid it around so that, as Estela took it, she could grasp the handpiece.
‘It’s a Luger – at least forty years old.’ She weighed the gun on her flat palm, then released the magazine. ‘Two bullets only. It don’ look as though it’s been cleaned since the war… where you get it?’
‘Off one of my sons. I took it off him: be either had to let it go or shoot me with it, stupid cunt. I guess now he’s saving for a Kalashnikov, or one of those flashier guns: Hecklers, AKs or something.’
‘An AK 47 is a Kalashnikov. Can you buy that kind of weapon in Manchester?
‘I guess so.’ Michael shrugged. ‘Even the cops have found a couple of Uzis. Listen, if you want the kraut gun, take it. I don’t want to see it again. The little bastard has probably got a new one – and he’ll probably shoot me the next time I try and take it off him.’
Estela dropped the Luger into her bag. She would have to strip it down before she began throwing her weight behind such an unlikely piece of hardware. According to the newspaper report, automatics had been used in the restaurant attack. She might find something like that. Or at least a shotgun, perhaps an ex-Jamaican army Smith and Wesson. For now, all she had was a two-shot Luger and no chance of finding ammunition capable of fitting the anachronistic nazi gauge – that was her luck, and still she believed in destiny. She puckered again – a long, slow suck through her bottom teeth. There were other ways of viewing the situation. She had heard people speak of the Luger as a classic, a masterpiece of Teutonic engineering. She was a Brazilian citizen and the Brazilians appreciated German design enough to keep the Volkswagen Beetle in production. Although her only link with Brazil came through the specialist cosmetic surgeons at her clinic in Rio.
She smiled her thanks at Michael. ‘Maybe you’d like to show me off tonight. Just two models vogueing their way around town, I know you’d love that.’
Michael did not look too anxious to be seen stepping out with her.
‘But first, I want to go to the gym.’
Michael shrugged, ‘The gym?’
‘I got to work out. Do you think you have anything I could wear?’
‘Clothes? Like a sweatshirt?’
‘Maybe a leotard.’