The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman Read Free Page B

and the light brown tie, but who’s counting? I went over and introduced myself, bought him a double Teachers and took him to the table by the piano.
            There was another thing he hadn’t mentioned, his eyes. They were blue, a cold blue, difficult to read until maybe it was too late. Eyes that looked me over, measuring me up, calculating distances and angles, eyes that could just as easily work out twenty-four different ways of killing me bare-handed as they could spot a lie before it left my lips. You can tell a lot from a man’s eyes: if he’s lying, how he’ll react to stress, sometimes even what he’s thinking. Iwanek’s eyes were as cold and hard as ice daggers and he hardly blinked as he crossed his legs, smoothed out the creases in his trousers and asked me what it was I was offering.
            I took a sip of my whisky. He hadn’t touched his. ‘I’m thirty-two years old and I am what’s called a corporate financier, a sort of merchant banker without a bank. I help arrange bank loans, company takeovers, share flotations, that sort of thing. Sometimes I act as a company doctor, find out where a firm is going wrong, why it’s losing money, suggest a remedy. I make a lot of money doing what I do because I do it well, very well. I’m an expert and in the City I’m a survivor. More than that, I’m a winner. But I have a problem, a big problem, and it’s one that I can’t cope with own my own.’
            Iwanek hadn’t moved while I talked, but I knew I was being measured up, assessed, and labelled as either truthful or not to be trusted.
            He leant back in his chair and steepled his fingers under his broad chin. His hands were smooth with long, delicate fingers and perfect, well-manicured nails. A stainless steel watch peeped out of his left sleeve as he gently tapped his two index fingers against his upper lip and looked into my soul.
            ‘I’ve been wronged, badly wronged, and I’m out for revenge. Two men have done me a grave injustice, just how bad I can’t tell you and maybe I never will but they deserve what’s coming to them. You’ll have to trust me on that score.
            ‘One is a drugs dealer and property developer with very nasty criminal connections and a stack of dangerous friends. The other is one of his associates, a business man of sorts, a whizz kid who’s acting as a front for the other guy’s money.
            ‘If these guys had crossed me in the City, if it had been business, then I could have coped on my own, I could have fought back. If they’d broken the law I could have gone to the police, or sued, but they were far too clever for that.’
            ‘What did they do?’ he asked.
            ‘I can’t tell you that. I just need your help, and I’m prepared to pay for it. And to pay well.’
            ‘You want them killed,’ he said, and it was a statement, not a question.
            ‘I want them dead, or put away for a long time. And I don’t want to be directly involved. I have a conscience, Jim, a set of values that was drilled into me from a very early age so no, I couldn’t point a gun at either of them and pull the trigger.’
            ‘You want someone else to do your dirty work.’ Another statement.
            ‘Yes, but not in the way you think. Sure, I could go into any of a dozen pubs in the East End, spend a little money and have their legs broken, maybe even killed. What would it cost me, a few hundred pounds? I could do that, but I couldn’t live with myself afterwards. All my time working in the City I’ve been honest, I’ve never doublecrossed anybody or deliberately hurt them. My word is my bond might sound corny in this day and age but that’s what my father taught me and those are the values that I’ve stuck to. I can’t betray him or myself, and I won’t even try.’
            ‘It’s not corny, but it puts you in a very difficult position. Maybe an impossible