Estela was woken by the sun through the blinds. The latitude was all wrong. The light felt weak and she felt cold. Her travelling clock said Two. She had to squint to read the flashing ‘p.m.’ sign. She remembered having company when she fell asleep. She was alone now. The only thing on her pillow was a black mascara rash. Beyond the headboard, a sluttish reflection stared at her with streaky panda-eyes. In God’s name, why were there so many mirrors in this flat? It was horrendous. Having to look at herself everywhere she turned, after three connecting flights and eighteen hours in the air. No wonder, once she arrived, she had run straight out again. She needed to find something to help her unwind.
Estela tripped out to the hallway, ignoring the used condom as she stood on it. She could tidy up details later. What she wanted to do, her primo priority, was dial herself another ten centigrade on the hallway thermostat. Before she left Manchester, the chill would have sunk straight through to her bones, she knew it.
When she took this job, she was promised a condo with all the extras: at least, a pool, a gym. She might take a photo of the dishwater-grey puddles outside her apartment. Show her boss what kind of swimming pool his dollars bought. He had no idea, he probably believed Manchester was like Maybe a little foggier. Whoever told him the apartment had a gym, they were taking a risk. If he found out that there was nothing but a nautilus machine in a room the size of a closet, someone was going to have to explain the joke. They could end up back in Medellin, putting bombs under judges and bishops. Héctor Barranco Garza preferred slapstick to most kinds of comedy.
When she reached the living room, she knew Yen was gone for good. Herr suitcases were still spread over the floor, only now they were open and her clothes were thrown across the carpet. Jesus and Maria, she would have to go through every case to work out what the little bastard had stolen. Her life was nothing but annoyances.
Stepping over a case, Estela made for the bathroom and its wall of mirrors. She felt that she would faint if she did not rehydrate her poor, problem combination skin soon. All the magazines warn that air travel is unforgiving on the complexion. If she could be basted in ice-cold Evian, she would pay for someone to turn her over every five minutes.
The telephone rang before she was out of the shower. She grabbed a towel and wrapped her hair up into a high, white towelling turban. There was a matching bathrobe hanging behind the door. She found the telephone beneath an upturned Macy’s bag.
‘Manchester office,’ she said, playing at secretaries.
‘Estela? How you doing?’ The confident, Hispanicised English of her boss. ‘I hope you relaxed, already. They got you a good condo. It gotta pool?’
‘It’s too cold for swimming, Héctor. It’s not stopped raining since I landed.’
‘No shit. And you probably jet-lagged to fuck, huh? I thought you never going to get to the phone.’
‘I’m a little slow this morning, Héctor. I took something to help me sleep last night. But once I get to work, I’ll be nursing my jet-lag by the side of your pool inside two days.’
‘I would love to see you by the pool, baby. I send the boys out for a tube of bathing milk and spread it over you with my tongue.’
Garza was in a good mood, playing it up in English. But he never let business details drift away in small talk
‘You got the package?’
Estela guessed so.
‘What d’you mean, you not looked? Santa Maria, Estela, get on the fucking page. It’s only a satellite connection, let me hang on the fucking phone while you go look. Don’ worry, I got better things I gotta do today.’
Estela dropped the handset to the floor and started for the bedroom. Garza’s voice continued to spill out of the earpiece and on to the carpet. She ran back for the receiver: ‘Sorry, Héctor?’
‘I said, you got conference? Put the phone on conference. You think I’m some loco schizz-nutzoid, I wanna talk to myself.’
Estela prodded the loudspeaker button at the front of the telephone. Garza’s voice followed her as she picked her way back to the spare bedroom. He shouted that she knew the procedure. What was her problem? She want to go see one of her fancy five-star pussy doctors – she wanna plead PMT, the fucking menopause or what? Estela knew the procedure, it was just that she wasn’t feeling altogether one hundred per cent. Garza had insisted she handle this job personally. She had never wanted to fly to England but Garza said this kind of business could not be trusted to a franchisee. It had to be done in-house.
‘Get with it, Estela. A job like this, I do it before breakfast. I do it between waking and walking to the fucking john, give my woody time to slack off. I hear you talk about England. I figure you know your way around, at leas’ how to act cool. Or what counts as cool, around Anglo-Protestant assholes.’
Estela recalled the whole conversation now. Garza did not think that Manchester was Miami in a fog. He thought the whole of England was like Boston, which he had visited once. In town just three hours, he had upended the maître d’ of the hotel restaurant in a bouillabaisse. Outraged, he could not believe the way the man had acted. If anyone thought that kind of behaviour was going to be tolerated – well, Héctor Barranco Garza pitied the whole fucking town. Estela could see him now, arms frozen in a shrug: I mean, the fuck is this. He had been looking forward to the trip. He imagined that everyone would look like Cary Grant or Grace Kelly, or perhaps Charles Laughton. He thought he would get to see some classy interpersonal skills in effect. Estela had tried to imagine Cary Grant with Charles Laughton, maybe a Grace Kelly sandwich trick. Visited by a full premonition, warning the Boston trip would end badly, Estela took a swerve by pleading business in Miami.
She walked into the smaller bedroom, expecting to find an attaché case in the closet. She did not expect to see it on the nautilus machine, wide open. She felt her knees go weak, looking at it lying there.
Yen had been through the case. There was no doubt, he had not tried to cover his thieving tracks. Where there should have been a Beretta, there were only a few scattered papers. Otherwise, the case was empty.
Garza’s voice didn’t give her the time she needed to think. She shouted that she had it; yes, yes. Garza could not have heard her, he was bellowing What? What? She scrambled the case and the papers together and hugged it closed as she ran back to the living room.
‘I got it, Héctor.’
‘Yeah? You got the folder?’
The photographs were no longer in the manila envelope. They were loose and turned frontwards, backwards, every way but the right way. She shuffled them around and looked down at the face of the man she was supposed to kill. Whoever put the package together had helpfully typed the name on each photograph, along with an arrow pointing to Mr John Burgess’s head. A marked man, the arrows pointing him out in a crowd and indicating the trajectory of a bullet. They could have left the graphics alone; Estela already knew his name.
She had to seem calm, there was no need to panic. She believed in fate, in the stars and their psycho-magnetic influence. She could play this, once she had seen the way the astral forces were spinning.
‘Estela?’
‘One second, Héctor, honey. These high-heels aren’ made for running after men.’
‘Let them run to you, huh? You do it your way, baby. Let him come over, you knock him back.’
Estela looked at the photographs again. Every last one showed the owner of the bar where she had cruised Yen the night before. John Burgess had placed his own picture high on the wall where he could smile beatifically down on his punters. She knew him. Worse, Yen knew him.
She needed to think this through. Yen had looked at the photographs. No doubt. But would he put it all together? Gun plus photo equals one dead man; bang, bang, bang. Estela rechecked the contents of the case. Apart from the Beretta, nothing seemed to be missing. Yen might have taken a photograph, she could not tell, but he probably had not.
‘No problems?’
‘Fine, Héctor. Tell me, what does our associate do?’
‘Fuck, Estela. This is no secret code line, we speaking in the open-fucking-air. You heard of spy satellites. He’s a money man, is all.’
‘He has some financial tools? He’s prepared to offer his services to a higher bidder?
‘Tha’ kind of shit, yeah. He wants to break an exclusive care contract previously negotiated with us. He go to auction, he give our competitors the same advantage in the European market we got. We wanna keep it proprietal. Okay?’
‘Okay, Héctor. I’ll see you soon. One, two days.’
‘Okay, baby. You know I wan’ you back by the pool. Until then, all the saints preserve you.’
She switched off the phone line and stared back into the case. All that was left inside was a plastic container with the raised logo Fempax, a tampon manufacturer. Her bullets were inside. As long as no stray bullet had been racked into the chamber, the Beretta was harmless. Estela did not know why Yen had avoided the tampon box. Maybe he was squeamish. If he was too stupid to check it out, that was in his favour.
Estela hoped that Yen was stupid. Really, really stupid. She would have to hunt him down, of course. The second she had put on her face, perhaps straightened the flat. It looked as though she might be in Manchester for a little longer than she had anticipated. She might as well make herself comfortable.
Yen sat on the office desk, swinging his legs and looking at the bottle of pills he had taken from his pocket. Theresa could clearly see the whitish capsules crowded on the inside of the brown glass, but it was obvious Yen did not know what they were. He was staring at the labelless bottle, his face blanker than usual.
The offices lay beneath the club in the old cellars with their curved bricked ceilings, a reminder that the Gravity had been a warehouse, before it was renovated and remodelled. Theresa and Yen sat on one side of the office, opposite the bank of TVs ranked along the facing wall, waiting for the show to start. It was Junk who invited them downstairs. He had asked if they wanted to view his latest video. Now he was crouched on the floor, stabbing at the VCR machine, his one good eye and his one glass eye fixed to the flashing green arrow. Junk had worked at the club since it opened and had access to the offices. It made Theresa nervous, trespassing downstairs. It didn’t bother Yen, he was only worried about his pills. Yen held the bottle up. ‘What do you think they are?’
Junk turned away from the machine, he had no idea. ‘What do I know? Why don’t you ask the woman who gave them you?’
Yen said, ‘Maybe. I don’t know if I’m seeing her again.’
‘Who was she?’
‘I don’t remember. She wasn’t from round here.’ Yen mimed a flamenco, clicking castanets. ‘Hispaniola or something. You know. Riva, Riva, El Mariachi.’
Yen emptied a clutch of the pills on to his hand and sniffed at them. Talking aloud, he said the woman wasn’t freaked by drugs. If she was Latino, maybe the pills were cocaine: straight outta Colombia and only moulded to look like standard pharmaceuticals. Although there could only be twenty-five grammes in total: the bottle held fifty pills.
‘Or they could be barbiturates. Valium or, you know, some equivalent.’
Theresa let him talk, watching him gape at the pills through his floppy fringe. She could guess what had happened. Once he was inside the woman’s flat, he would wait until she was asleep and run through her medicine cabinet. Theresa was the same age as Yen but it was only after meeting him that she began to feel especially mature. He was dreaming if he thought they were cocaine. If he honestly thought they were Valium, let him experiment.
‘Well, what are they?’
Theresa shrugged. She knew Yen would try a couple. Even a handful, just as he had with those anti-psychotic pills last year. He pronounced them Halaperadol and had snapped back more than a dozen. An hour and a half later, Yen’s jaw had gone into a spasm, his teeth virtually welded together. His mouth took on a horrendous Jack Nicholson grin that had grown more and more painful through the night. The doctor described the side-effect as sardonicus rictus, although it was another forty-eight hours before Yen admitted himself to hospital. Until then, he had rolled a comic book into a tube and forced it between his teeth. It did nothing to stop the upper teeth from grinding against the lower ones. The comic ended up with a mouth-size chunk bitten out of its centre.
Theresa would have reminded Yen of that time but even he could not have forgotten. The whole medical staff at the hospital, doctors and nurses, came out to look at the idiot who had swallowed a case-load of Halaperadol. Theresa kept Yen company but made him tell the doctors himself what was wrong. It wasn’t that she minded too much being associated with a moron. She had thought it would be funny, watching him trying to talk like a mad ventriloquist, pronouncing the name of the drug through clenched teeth. It was funny. Especially when the first injection of antidote only partially worked and his tongue began to loll uncontrollably out from his painful smile. But she wasn’t in a hurry to go through it again. Yen put the bottle away and started work on a joint. It was neatly rolled and trimmed inside a few seconds but it was Theresa who had to find an ashtray.
Junk’s tape had spooled to its beginning. He pressed Play and a selection of cartoons flashed on screen. They seemed to be elongated, as though they had been stretched for cinescope. Bugs Bunny was short and fat and moved with a pensive waddle. Theresa didn’t know how Junk had made him do that.
Junk stood up and stretched, looking over at Yen. ‘Careful where you leave the roach. I don’t want Burgess to know I’m using his office during the day.’
Back in her bathroom, Estela found her supply of Chicadol was missing. She could weep. They were the best hormone pills she’d ever found. They gave her the best shape she’d ever seen.