Читать книгу The Last Temptation - Val McDermid, Val McDermid - Страница 9

Blue is one colour the Danube never manages. Slate grey, muddy brown, dirty rust, sweat-stained khaki; all of these and most of the intermediate shades sabotage the dreams of any romantic who stands on her banks. Occasionally, where boats gather, she achieves a kind of oily radiance as the sun shimmers on a skin of spilled fuel, turning the river the iridescent hues of a pigeon’s throat. On a dark night when clouds obscure the stars, she’s as black as the Styx. But there, in central Europe at the turning of the new millennium, it cost rather more than a penny to pay the ferryman.

From both land and water, the place looked like a deserted, rundown boat repair yard. The rotting ribs of a couple of barges and corroded components from old machinery, their former functions a mystery, were all that could be glimpsed through the gaps in the planks of the tall gates. Anyone curious enough to have stopped their car on the quiet back road and peered into the yard would have been satisfied that they were looking at yet another graveyard for a dead communist enterprise.

But there was no apparent reason for anybody to harbour idle curiosity about this particular backwater. The only mystery was why, even in those illogical totalitarian days, it had ever been thought there was any point in opening a business there. There was no significant population centre for a dozen miles in any direction. The few farms that occupied the hinterland had always required more work to make them profitable than their occupants could provide; no spare hands there. When this boatyard was in operation, the workers had been bussed fifteen miles to get to work. Its only advantage was its position on the river, sheltered from the main flow by a long sandbar covered in scrubby bushes and a few straggling trees leaning in the direction of the prevailing wind.

That remained its signal selling point to those who covertly used this evidently decaying example of industrial architecture from the bad old days. For this place was not what it seemed. Far from being a ruin, it was a vital staging post on a journey. If anyone had taken the trouble to give the place a closer look, they would have started to notice incongruities. The perimeter fence, for example, made of sheets of prefabricated reinforced concrete. It was in surprisingly good repair. The razor wire that ran along the top looked far more recent than the fall of communism. Not much to go on, in truth, but clues that were there to be read by those who are fluent in the language of deviousness.

If such a person had mounted surveillance on the apparently deserted boatyard that night, they would have been rewarded. But when the sleek black Mercedes purred along the back road, there were no curious eyes to see. The car halted short of the gates and the driver climbed out, shivering momentarily as cold damp air replaced the climate-controlled environment. He fumbled in the pockets of his leather jacket, coming out with a bunch of keys. It took him a couple of minutes to work his way through the four unfamiliar padlocks, then the gates swung silently open under his touch. He pushed them all the way back, then hurried back to the car and drove inside.

As the driver closed the gates behind the Mercedes, two men emerged from the back of the saloon. Tadeusz Radecki stretched his long legs, shaking the creases out of his Armani suit and reaching back into the car for his long sable coat. He’d felt the cold as never before lately, and it was a raw night, his breath emerging from his nostrils in filmy plumes. He pulled the fur close around him and surveyed the scene. He’d lost weight recently, and in the pale gloom cast by the car’s headlamps the strong bones of his face were a reminder of the skull beneath the skin, his darting hazel eyes the only sign of the vitality within.

Darko Krasic strolled round to stand beside him, angling his wrist up so he could see the dial of his chunky gold watch. ‘Half past eleven. The truck should be here any minute now.’

Tadeusz inclined his head slightly. ‘I think we’ll take the package ourselves.’

Krasic frowned. ‘Tadzio, that’s not a good idea. Everything’s set up. There’s no need for you to get so close to the merchandise.’

‘You think not?’ Tadeusz’s tone was deceptively negligent. Krasic knew better than to argue. The way his boss had been acting lately, not even his closest associates were prepared to risk the flare of his anger by crossing him.

Krasic held his hands up in a placatory gesture. ‘Whatever,’ he said.

Tadeusz stepped away from the car and began to prowl the boatyard, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. Krasic was right in one sense. There was no need for him to involve himself directly in any aspect of his business. But nothing was to be taken for granted just now. His mindset had been shaped by his grandmother, who, in spite of the noble blood she insisted flowed in her veins, had been as superstitious as any of the peasants she’d so despised. But she’d dressed up her irrational convictions in the fancy clothes of literary allusion. So, rather than teach the boy that troubles come in threes, she’d enlisted Shakespeare’s adage that ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions’.

Katerina’s death should have been sorrow enough. Tadeusz prided himself on never allowing his face to give him away, either in business or in personal relationships. But that news had transformed his face into a howling mask of grief, tears flooding his eyes as a silent scream tore through him. He’d always known he’d loved her; he just hadn’t grasped how much.

What made it worse was that it had been so ridiculous. So very Katerina. She’d been driving her Mercedes SLK with the top down. She’d just left the Berlin ring road at the Ku’damm exit, so she’d probably still been going too fast when a motorbike shot out from a side street in front of her. Desperate to avoid hitting the careless rider, she’d swerved towards the pavement, lost control of the powerful roadster and careered into a newspaper kiosk. She’d died in the arms of a paramedic, her head injuries too appalling to comprehend.

The biker was long gone, unaware of the carnage he’d left in his wake. And mechanical examination had discovered a fault in the circuit that controlled the anti-lock braking in the Merc. That, at any rate, was the official version.

But once his initial grief had receded to the point where he could function again, Tadeusz had begun to wonder. Krasic, ever the loyal lieutenant, had reported that in Tadeusz’s temporary absence there had been a couple of more or less subtle attempts to move in on his business. Krasic, who had stoically refused to be distracted by his boss’s bereavement, had dealt ruthlessly with the threats, but as soon as Tadeusz showed signs of life again, he had laid out the full story before him.

Now, the word was out. Tadeusz wanted the biker. The police officers on his payroll had been little help; information from witnesses was scant. It had all happened so fast. It had just started to rain, so passing pedestrians had their heads down against the weather. There were no surveillance cameras in the immediate area.

The private investigator Tadeusz had hired to re-interview the witnesses had come up with a little more. One teenage boy had been enough of a wannabe rider himself to have noticed that the machine was a BMW. Now, Tadeusz was waiting impatiently for his police contacts to provide a list of possible candidates. One way or another, whether her death had been an accident or a more cruel design, someone was going to pay for it.

While he waited, Tadeusz knew he had to keep himself occupied. Usually, he left the planning on the ground to Krasic and the competent cadre of organizers they’d built around them over the years. He dealt in the big picture and the details were not his concern. But he was edgy. There were threats out there in the shadows, and it was time to make sure that all the links in the chain were still as sound as they had been when the systems were set up.

And it did no harm now and again to remind the peons who was in charge.

He walked over to the water’s edge, gazing down the river. He could just make out the leading lights of a huge Rhineship, the grumble of its engine drifting across the water. As he watched, the barge angled into the narrow, deep channel that would bring it alongside the boatyard wharf. Behind him, Tadeusz heard the gates opening again.

He turned to see a battered van drive in. The van cut away to one side, over by the Mercedes. Moments later, he heard the electronic beep of a reversing warning. A large container lorry backed into the boatyard. Three men jumped out of the van. Two made their way towards the wharf, while the third, dressed in the uniform of a Romanian customs officer, headed for the back of the truck, where he was joined by the truck driver. Between them, they removed the customs seal from the container, unfastened the locks and let the doors swing open.

Inside the container were stacked cases of canned cherries. Tadeusz curled his lip at the sight. Who in their right mind would contemplate eating Romanian canned cherries, never mind importing them by the truckload? As he looked on, the customs man and the driver started to unload the boxes. Meanwhile, behind him, the barge glided up to the wharf, where the two men expertly helped it moor.

Swiftly, a narrow passage between the cardboard boxes appeared. There was a moment’s pause then, suddenly, bodies surged through the gap and leapt to the ground. Bewildered Chinese faces gleamed sweating in the dim lights that glowed from vehicles and the barge. The stream of humanity slowed, then stopped. Around forty Chinese men huddled tight together, bundles and backpacks clutched to their chests, their frightened eyes flickering to and fro across the alien boatyard like horses who smell the taint of blood. They were shivering in the sudden cold, their thin clothes no protection against the chill of the river air. Their uneasy silence was more unsettling than any amount of chatter could have been.

A whisper of a breeze gusted a waft of stale air from the back of the lorry towards Tadeusz. His nose wrinkled in distaste at the mingled smells of sweat, urine, and shit, all overlaid with a faint chemical tang. You’d have to be desperate to choose this way to travel. It was a desperation that had made a significant contribution to his personal wealth, and he had a certain grudging respect for those with courage enough to take the path to freedom he offered.

Swiftly, the truck driver, the two men from the van and the barge crew organized their cargo. A couple of the Chinese spoke enough German to act as interpreters and the illegals were readily pressed into service. First they emptied the truck of its cherries and chemical toilets, then hosed down the interior. Once it was clean, they formed a human chain and transferred boxes of canned fruit from a container on the barge to the lorry. Finally, the Chinese climbed aboard the barge and, without any apparent reluctance, made their way into the now empty container. Tadeusz’s crew built a single layer of boxes between the illegals and the container doors, then the customs official affixed seals identical to the ones he’d removed earlier.

It was a smooth operation, Tadeusz noted with a certain amount of pride. The Chinese had come into Budapest on tourist visas. They’d been met by one of Krasic’s men and taken to a warehouse where they’d been moved into the container lorry. A couple of days before, the barge had been loaded under the eyes of customs officials near Bucharest with an entirely legal cargo. Here, in the middle of nowhere, they’d rendezvoused and been swapped. The barge would take far longer than the lorry to reach Rotterdam, but it was much less likely to be searched, given its documentation and customs seals. Any nosy official with serious doubts could be referred to the local customs who had supervised the loading. And the lorry, which was far more likely to be stopped and searched, would continue to its destination with an unimpeachable cargo. If anyone had seen anything suspicious enough at the airport or the warehouse to alert the authorities, all they would find would be a truckload of canned cherries. If officials noted the Hungarian customs seals had been interfered with, the driver could easily shrug it off as vandalism or an attempt at theft.

As the customs official crossed back to the truck, Tadeusz intercepted him. ‘A moment, please. Where is the parcel for Berlin?’

Krasic frowned. He’d almost begun to think that his boss had had sensible second thoughts about the Chinese heroin the illegals had brought with them to pay part of their passage. There was no reason for Tadzio to change the systems that Krasic had so punctiliously set up. No reason other than the foolish superstitions he’d been prey to since Katerina’s death.

The customs man shrugged. ‘Better ask the driver,’ he said with a nervous grin. He’d never seen the big boss before, and it was a privilege he could well have done without. Krasic’s ruthlessness in Tadeusz’s name was a legend among the corrupt of Central Europe.

Tadeusz cocked an eyebrow at the driver.

‘I keep it in the casing of my CB radio,’ the driver said. He led Tadeusz round to the lorry cab and pulled the radio free of its housing. It left a gap large enough to hold four sealed cakes of compressed brown powder.

‘Thank you,’ Tadeusz said. ‘There’s no need for you to be troubled with that on this trip.’ He reached inside and extracted the packages. ‘You’ll still get your money, of course.’

Krasic watched, feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d crossed a frontier with so much as a joint of cannabis. Driving across Europe with four kilos of heroin seemed like insanity. His boss might be suffering from a death wish, but Krasic didn’t want to join the party. Muttering a prayer to the Virgin, he followed Tadeusz back to the limo.