Vicious Circle

“No,” I said. “But I’ve heard of him. Recently. A friend of mine was looking for information on you, and his name came up.”

“Yeah,” Peace agreed, grimly. “I’m not surprised. Fanke was something really big and special in the circles Mel moved in. Carried himself like he knew it, too. Fucking arrogant son of a bitch. Charming enough, but you know that sort of charm where it’s just another way of fucking you up the arse? Like what matters is being on top the whole time, and if he can’t do it one way he’ll do it another. You don’t want to be there when the charm offensive stops, because you know it’s going to be bloody.

“But there was no way past it. Being around Mel meant being around Fanke, too. I thought she was screwing him, too, at first, but I don’t think his vices were that close to normal: he was her priest, not her boyfriend, and that was a lot harder to deal with. After two weeks I’d had just about enough.”

Peace looked up again and met my gaze, again inviting or defying me to judge him. “So bearing in mind what I’ve already told you about my MO,” he said, with a sarcastic smile, “what do you think I did next?”

I shrugged, took a gulp of my coffee while I gave that one what little thought it deserved. The stuff was half-cold now, but the liquor still had a little bit of a kick to it. “You woke up before she did,” I said, “and you cleaned her out. Took that necklace you mentioned, and whatever money you could get your hands on, and did a runner.”

Peace nodded. “Got it in one,” he acknowledged, his tone a little bleak. “She had almost two thousand dollars, and the jewelry was worth that much again even to one of the fences down on Banfora Street. I took her stash, too. Swiped the lot and scarpered, thinking what a nasty, clever little bastard I am. I get the girl and I get the money, just like James Bond.

“I went back to the scummy little flophouse where I was staying, and turned in for a bit more sleep. I’d never got much of that in Mel’s bed. The next thing I know, the police are smashing the door in and I’m under arrest for drug trafficking.

“I never did figure out the ins and outs of that one. Most likely it was coincidence—or the gents I’d been working for getting their own back in a slightly subtler way than I’d have given them credit for. Maybe they’d been watching for me to go back home again, and this was a trap they would have sprung earlier if I hadn’t been otherwise engaged. But at the time, it made me wonder. It was so pat: like, I burned her, and I got burned back, twice as bad.

“The cops took all the cash I had on me, so I had nothing left to bribe the judge with. They sent me down for two years. Could have been worse: if I’d been a local lad, I’d probably have been swinging on the end of a rope.

“Didn’t matter much in the end, in any case. Mel came down and bought me out before I’d done a week of that time. Probably just as well, because I was already in trouble. The only white boy on the yard, and too stupid to stay out of fights. I’d taken at least one beating every day I was there, and by the time she came to get me I could barely walk.”

“Everyone needs a guardian angel,” I observed, downing the last of the tepid coffee.

Peace laughed. “Yeah. Everyone does. God forbid you should ever end up with mine.”

“You need another drink?” I asked him, because he’d gone quiet again, his face reflecting a parade of mostly unpleasant memories.

“No more booze?”

“No.”

“Then don’t bother. Where was I?”

“You’d just played your get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“Not free, Castor. Nothing like free. I’d already hit the eject button on Mel once, and she wasn’t going to let me do it again. Or maybe it was Fanke who set it up, I don’t know. Anyway, the way it worked, it wasn’t exactly like I got a pardon or anything: it was more like they had me on lease, and Mel made it clear that they could send me back if I didn’t mind my manners and say my prayers at bedtime.

“I said she was into slave games. She’d been the slave the first time around. Now it was my turn, and she really went to town. If ever a man was made to eat shit, that man was me.”

I opened my mouth to interject a question, then shut it again, better just to assume that that was a metaphor. I looked at my watch. It had been twenty minutes since I called Pen: I reckoned another ten or fifteen before Dylan got here.

“Tell me about Abbie,” I suggested to Peace. I was getting a little sick of hearing about his sex life. But I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t drawing this out because of any misplaced sense of drama: there was a place in his past that he really didn’t want to revisit, and we were almost there.

“I thought Mel was just a sort of weird life-form that lived on sex and pain,” he murmured. “I never thought she had any agenda beyond what was happening right there, right then. But I underestimated her. I really did.”