The Power(51)

‘Can you come up to the window, driver,’ says a woman’s voice through the intercom. ‘We need to see your ID and pick-up forms.’

Fuck.

So he drives round to the gatehouse – what else is he going to do? He’s come through loads of times – most of those pick-ups are legitimate. He does a bit of import-export. Kids’ toys for market-stall holders; has a little business, turns a handy profit, cash transactions a lot of it and not all on the books. He sits up nights making up names of stall holders he’s sold to. Bernie Monke set him up with a stall himself down Peckham Market; he’s down there on a Saturday to make the thing look legit, cos you don’t want to get stupid. Nice toys, a lot of them: wooden, from Eastern Europe. And the hourglasses. Course they’ve never called him round the gatehouse when he’s been shifting little wood robots held together with elastics, or them carved ducks on a string. They’ve got to fucking call him in for this.

There’s a woman there he’s never seen before. Big glasses on her face, halfway up her forehead and right down past the end of her nose. Owl glasses. Steve wishes he’d had a bit of something himself, just a little bit before he came out. Can’t carry any in the van, it’d be stupid, they’ve got sniffer dogs. That’s the good thing about these hourglasses, egg-timers. He didn’t understand it when Bernie showed him. Bernie tipped the egg-timer thing over. The sand fell through golden and soft. Bernie said, ‘Don’t be a muppet, what do you think’s inside here? Sand?’ Inside the glass, and that glass inside another glass tube. Double-sealed. Wash them all down with rubbing alcohol before they go in the boxes and Bob’s your uncle, nothing for the sniffer dogs to get hold of. You’d have to smash one of those egg-timers open before the dogs could tell what it was.

‘Paperwork?’ she says, and he hands it over. He makes a joke about the fucking weather but she doesn’t even crack a smile. She looks through the manifest. A couple of times she gets him to read out a word or a number to her, to make sure she’s got it right. Behind her, he sees Jeff’s face for a few moments against the security glass of the back door. Jeff makes a ‘sorry, mate’ face and shakes his head at the back of the hard-arse woman. Fuck.

‘Can you come with me, please?’ She motions Steve towards a private office off to the side.

‘What’s the problem,’ Steve jokes to the world at large, although there’s no one there, ‘can’t get enough of me?’

Still doesn’t smile. Fuck fuck fuck. There’s something in the paperwork’s made her suspicious. He’s done it all himself, that paperwork; he knows it’s right. She’s heard something. She’s been sent in by the narcs. She knows something.

She motions him to sit opposite her at the small table. She sits, too.

‘What’s this all about, love?’ he says. ‘Only I’m due in Bermondsey in an hour and a half.’

She grabs his wrist and puts her thumb to the place between the small bones, just where the hand joins the arm, and suddenly it’s on fire. Flames inside his bones, the veins shrivelling, curling up, blackening. Fuck, she’s going to pull his hand off.

‘Don’t say anything,’ she says. And he won’t, he couldn’t, not if he tried.

‘Roxy Monke’s taken over this business now. You know who she is? You know who her dad is? Don’t say nothing, just nod.’

Steve nods. He knows.

‘You’ve been skimming, Steve.’

He tries to shake his head, to gabble, No, no, no, you’ve got it wrong, it weren’t me, but she presses the pain into his wrist so he thinks she’s going to crack it open.

‘Every month,’ she says, ‘just one or two of them egg-timers don’t get listed on your books. You get me, Steve?’

He nods.

‘And it stops now, right. Right now. Or you’re out of the business. Understand?’

He nods. She lets him go. He cradles his wrist in his other hand. You can’t even see on the skin that anything’s happened to him.

‘Good,’ she says, ‘cos we’ve got something special this month. Don’t try to move it till you hear from us, OK?’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah.’

He drives off with eight hundred egg-timers neatly packaged up in boxes in the back of his van, all the paperwork correct, every carton accounted for. He doesn’t take a look till he’s back at his lockup and he’s taken the edge off the pain. Yeah. He can see it. There is something different. All the ‘sand’ in these hourglasses is tinged with purple.

Roxy’s counting money. She could get one of the girls to do it; they’ve already done it once and she could call someone in to count it up in front of her. But she likes doing it herself. Feeling the paper under her fingertips. Watching her decisions turn into maths turn into power.

Bernie’s said to her more than once, ‘The day someone else knows where your money’s going better than you do, that’s the day you’ve lost.’ It’s like a magic trick, money. You can turn money into anything. One, two, three, presto. Turn drugs into influence with Tatiana Moskalev, President of Bessapara. Turn your ability to bring pain and fear into a factory where the authorities will turn a blind eye to whatever you’re cooking up there that sends purple-tinged steam into the skies at midnight.