or five doors down, red canopy. That’s our place.’
‘Aren’t we going in now?’
‘For God’s sake, Donal, we’re high rollers! We don’t go anywhere on foot. We’ll hail a black cab.’
‘Damn, if only you’d brought your Hot Rod Mondeo. They’d be laying their black bomber jackets over the puddles …’
‘Shut up and stick this on.’
I felt something pushing into my hand, opened my fingers to find a silver watch with a comedy-large red face. Fintan was already strapping what looked like an alarm clock to his wrist.
‘That,’ he said, nodding over to my scarlet arm-candy, ‘is a Paul Newman Rolex Daytona 6565, worth 200 grand. I’m letting you have the flashiest watch because you’re most in need of sprucing up.’
‘Gee, thanks … 200 grand? For a watch?’
‘Yeah, bonkers, isn’t it? Then they have the gall to complain when they get mugged. Only Father fucking Time himself knows these are fakes, so make sure you flash yours towards the apes on the door. And, later, at the mutton inside. They’re experts at wheedling out real money from time wasters. So keep your sleeve high and the hoes will come a running. It’ll be no change for you really, will it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Relying on your right wrist for sex!’
He hailed a black cab and we dived in.
‘Here,’ he said to the driver, handing him a tenner, ‘take a loop round the block, then drop us outside the Florentine. Keep the change.’
I could never summon up the chutzpah for an enterprise like this alone. But Fintan thrived upon it. Although this probably confirmed my long-held suspicion that he was a fantasist, it also made him an ideal wingman. He didn’t so much get into character as transmogrify. Like that time he posed as a restaurant critic for the Irish Times, earning us a three-course meal at the trendy new Atlantic Bar and Grill in Piccadilly. He’d even insisted on inspecting the kitchens.
‘Hey,’ smiled the scoop monger, mission-high, ‘this’ll be the closest you’ve got to a piece of female ass since, ooh let me think, your actual birth?’
‘Very good, Fint. I must tell that one to Mam. She’s so proud of you already. You know she’s stopped going to the local shop altogether now? Too embarrassed by all your sordid “bonking bishop” exposés.’
That wiped the smirk off his face.
‘Imagine,’ he said, shaking his head sadly, ‘there’s men of the cloth out there who are getting more sex than you.’
The taxi driver pulled up a door down from the Florentine. A sudden twang of dread strummed my nerve endings. I’d confidently pictured myself inside the club, talking the talk. After all, how intimidating could these hostesses-cum-hookers be? And they didn’t even know that their colleague Liz had been murdered. Not yet.
What I hadn’t prepared for was ‘walking the walk’ past the leering row of bouncers outside. This small army of enormous dead-eyed Slavs had probably disposed of Liz’s body earlier today. What if they guessed from my haircut that I’m a cop? What if, while I’m inside asking awkward questions, they found a way to confirm I’m a cop?
‘Get out of the fucking car,’ hissed Fintan from the pavement.
I let him lead. Fintan’s streetwise swagger imbued him with confidence, whereas my metronomic stomp screamed farm labourer or escaped village idiot.
The bouncers’ pitiless eyes had already fastened upon us, seeking out hidden truths. I imagined them with Predator-style infrared vision, peering into our very souls. I wondered suddenly what I’d say if they stopped me. We hadn’t made any plans for that. And I’d always been hopeless at lying.
I took a quick scan of their faces: glum, hateful, exhausted. Small wonder; it can be wearing work halving, disemboweling and draining a hooker. Terrible hours.
I’d heard about these Eastern European muscle men, how easily they could make people disappear before vanishing themselves. I pictured their homelands brimming with gaunt, ravenous, psychotic replacements.
I thought about spinning on my heels and fleeing. They’d never catch me. But Fintan was already level with the first two members of our unwelcoming committee. This was it.
As I winced through their glowering death stares, I couldn’t help bracing myself for unexpected impact – as you might walking through an open gate at an automatic tube ticket barrier.
I checked my ‘millionaire alert’ timepiece more often than a Chechen suicide bomber, but none of the goons clocked it. Surely just one well-aimed shimmer of Rolex would mark me out as a youthful captain of industry ‘slumming it’ incognito for the night. In desperation, I faked an itchy forearm and wafted it in front of their faces, back and forth, like a lighter at an Aerosmith concert.
‘Excuse me, sir?’ came the gruff Soviet-baddie command and I leapt fully four inches off the red carpet. I landed but my heart remained lodged somewhere around my Adam’s apple, beating so hard that I couldn’t speak. I nodded, mouth open, like a halfwit.
‘We will need to see ID, proof of age.’
Fintan turned back, a well-rehearsed picture of surprised innocence, while my mind performed a rapid-fire inventory of everything on my person that proved my 23 years.
‘As you can probably tell, gentlemen,’ Fintan gushed, ‘we’re on a very low-key night out. Neither of us expected this to happen. Though I can tell my 23-year-old friend over there is absolutely thrilled.’
Fintan threw me a look that said: ‘Snap out of it now. TALK!’
‘You are both Irish?’ asked the Russian.
Fintan nodded.
‘Then we require ID for you too,’ he said, his darkening eyes letting Fintan know he wasn’t swallowing any of his old blarney, ‘and we must frisk you.’
‘May I ask why?’ Fintan laughed, a little too desperately.
‘Oh, let me see,’ said Russki, his heavy-lidded, hateful eyes somehow managing to convey both tired boredom and latent violence, ‘last October you blow up Sussex Arms in Covent Garden; last November, Canary Wharf; last December, the city centre of Manchester …’
‘Say no more,’ said Fintan, reaching into an inside jacket pocket and producing his driving licence. Russki barked something at his underlings. One began writing down the licence details while the other introduced Fintan’s inside legs to what looked like a black table tennis bat with lights.
My insides collapsed in horrible realisation. I had only one piece of picture ID on me. And I didn’t want any of these men to know I was a cop.
‘I haven’t brought any ID,’ I announced flatly.
Russki looked at me balefully. ‘Close up, you look older. We just search you.’
‘No need to bother,’ I said, hands-up, taking a step back, ‘I can go home and get it, be back in half an hour.’
I took another baby step back and trod on a foot. I turned to apologise, only to nuzzle a great wall of chest belonging to another bouncer – and he wasn’t moving.
‘I’m sure you have nothing to hide from our friend Yulian,’ said Russki with a smile. ‘We do a quick search, you go in.’
My eyes locked onto Fintan’s, relaying the bad news. Through some inexplicable sibling sympatico, he read it instantly.
‘Hang on one minute there,’ he piped up. ‘If he says he wants to go, then he’s free to go. And after this harassment, I’m leaving too.’
Russki’s enormous left hand reached out to Fintan’s chest, shutting him down. Yulian