Twist Read online

  She saw something move in one of the tubes and it made her start, which elicited a laugh from a man with black eyes. He was sat behind a desk in the middle of the chamber beneath a white dome that reminded Red of a church or a cathedral. As she got closer to the man, the chamber opened up and she caught sight of a second man – Sikes – standing off to the left of the desk. Then a flash of movement in the glass tube to her left caught her eye and she saw a squid propel itself along the inside of the tube.

  The man behind the desk leant back and smiled, opening his hands like a priest drawing a couple together to take their marriage vows. He looked at Sikes, then at Red. He had a long face, high cheekbones drawn tight across his skin which was chalk white. His eyes were thin slits and she could not see inside them but she could tell that they were reading her, scanning her face for micro-signals that would give him a clue to her relationship with Sikes.

  ‘Rodchenko says you owe him money,’ Bill said, turning to her, his face a mask.

  She turned and felt a wave of relief flood through her as Sikes’s lynx-like eyes met her own. She was burning up inside. The fear almost overwhelming her capacity to think straight but here he stood, as cool and as confident as ever, as if, in a strange way, he was at home here, among his own kind.

  ‘… Says that if you go poking your nose in you have to pay the price,’ Bill went on.

  There was a cracking sound and Red looked up and saw the Russian unlock his fingers and place them down on the desk.

  ‘What price do I have to pay?’ Red asked, looking between Bill and Rodchenko, knowing instinctively that some kind of a deal had already been struck.

  ‘We,’ Sikes went on. ‘What price do we have to pay?’

  Rodchenko leant forwards and looked Red up and down. She felt his eyes crawl up her legs, exploring the shadows between them, her hips and the curve where her waist narrowed before pausing below her breasts, nodding at her to unfold her arms. She let her hands fall at her sides and saw Rodchenko smile, then look at Sikes who was staring at the wall behind the Russian, giving nothing away.

  ‘Can I just say, Mr Rodchenko,’ Bill said, turning at last to look straight at the Russian mob boss, ‘what an honour it would be to work for you.’

  Red felt her stomach knot inside. Sometimes Bill overstepped the mark but the Russian let what could have been interpreted as impertinence slide. Instead he sat back in his chair, drawing both hands back across the desk until they reached the catalogue he had been holding. He turned and pushed it towards them so they had no choice but to look down at the six pictures arranged sequentially, left to right, like the storyboard of a film.

  Red took three steps closer. The pictures looked old. Maybe two or three hundred years old and they were spread out like a cartoon strip. She caught sight of a fresh-faced young girl, about her age, wearing a white bonnet and standing next to a hideous old crone. She looked at the second plate and saw the same girl caught in bed with a young lover by an older male in a wig, which explained her presence in what looked like a brothel in the third, her imprisonment, treatment for syphilis and finally her funeral in what looked like a madhouse full of lecherous vicars and working girls blighted by pox.

  ‘Do you like this story?’ Rodchenko said, smiling like a wolf across the table at Red.

  She tried to brighten but could feel the muscles in her face tense up, making it impossible to smile back.

  ‘They were painted by a man called Hogarth and up until recently only copies existed. Three of the originals were lost, supposedly in a fire in the 1750s, but they have now surfaced and are in the hands of a dealer called Losberne in Mayfair.’

  Rodchenko paused briefly, waving his hand behind him where the ambient light in the glass tubes changed colour with the passing of a squid. It was alien, otherworldly as it propelled itself along, reminding Red of things she had seen in jars filled with formaldehyde.

  ‘You’ll never be able to shift them,’ Sikes said.

  Rodchenko looked slightly perplexed, then broke into a smile that became a laugh as though Sikes had made a joke.

  ‘Who says I want to sell them?’ he began. ‘They will be a gift. My boss likes pictures that tell stories. Do you know this one?’

  Red watched as Rodchenko stood up and unbuttoned his shirt. His skin was pale and hairless on his broad chest and there was a picture there, tattooed into the flesh of his left pectoral. It was a picture of the Madonna and Child. Red watched Rodchenko’s eyes meet Bill’s to see if he understood the meaning of the iconic image and Bill nodded.

  ‘It means I have been a thief since I was a child,’ Rodchenko said, turning his eyes towards Red as his fingers worked the last button back into place.

  Red felt like she was falling. She tried to breathe but Rodchenko’s stare was somehow suffocating and as her brain raced to recall where she’d seen tattoos like his before, she felt tiny pinpricks creep up her spine, crossing the nape of her neck and spreading wide across the base of her skull as if a million tiny tattoo artists had somehow been set to work by their dark master, who stood weighing her fear from behind his desk on the far side of the room.

  She’d heard so many stories from Fagin about the criminal types that he had met but one stood in front of her now. A rake-thin, pale-skinned sixty-six-year-old ex-con from his circus years who had been known only by his stage name, ‘Stalag 17’, who made his living by staggering out into the round roaring drunk, balancing lit Molotov cocktails on his arms which he would then catch and threaten to hurl into the crowd.

  Fagin had described the fire-breathing dragon coiled up on Stalag 17’s right pectoral, spewing flames across his chest at St Michael as the archangel ran it through with his glimmering lance. But most of all, Red recalled Fagin’s retelling of the man’s story. Of his imprisonment in Stalin’s gulag and his initiation as a vor v zakone, a ‘thief in law’ bound by an eighteen-point code of conduct, following which he had forsaken his own family, denounced all women and agreed to help all other thieves on pain of mutilation or death if he violated the code.

  ‘You will steal the three paintings that have been found,’ Rodchenko began. ‘You must infiltrate the Losberne gallery and steal them from him. Meanwhile, I will pay a visit to the private collector who has the existing three paintings and find out when and where he will put them up for auction. You will know the location of the auction when I do, but it will only be revealed to the elite of the art world twenty-four hours before the event. You will infiltrate the auction and steal the paintings.’

  Red looked at Bill, whose face finally registered emotion. She saw to her horror that his eyes were smiling. As though the request amused him.

  ‘Just so I’m clear,’ he said, ‘you want us to first steal three paintings from the vault of a Mayfair gallery and then, with news of the theft buzzing in the ears of every art buyer, dealer and detective in London, hit a major auction house to steal the remaining three?’

  Red saw Rodchenko smile.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said.

  ‘And what happens if Fagin says no?’ Red asked, stepping forwards. ‘He only ever takes jobs from one man.’

  She watched Rodchenko nod his head to the Bear behind him, who smiled and nodded back. Red’s mind raced.

  ‘How am I going to sell this to my boss?’ Bill asked.

  ‘The paintings as a set of originals are valued at sixty million,’ Rodchenko went on. ‘We will advance the costs of the job and give you a ten per cent fee upon delivery.’

  ‘And what if our boss refuses to work with you?’ Red asked.

  ‘Then I’m afraid you will experience first-hand …’ Rodchenko smiled at Red as he turned the catalogue on the table so she could look at the sequence of pictures again that showed the downward spiral of degradation, disease and death of a girl her own age almost three hundred years ago. ‘Yet another case of life imitating art.’

  10

  Working double time in the library, washing dishes, scrubbing floors and running in the go
vernor’s infamous cross-country team had all stacked up in Twist’s favour. He’d qualified for day parole and been driven, on his request, to plant trees outside a local old people’s home on the outskirts of the governor’s village in Hampshire.

  He’d hated running for the governor in Beltham. Out on the gravel track in a singlet and shorts running 12 by 400m repeats while the boss man stood barking into a loud hailer from the centre of the field. But that day on parole, when he’d ditched his spade and legged it across the gardens of the old people’s home, the training had been put to good use. He’d quickly outpaced the screws, running through a Christmas tree farm before climbing up a steep escarpment, through a beech wood and never once looking back until he had a quarter of a mile on his pursuers.

  And he was still running now. Into the estate and up the cracked asphalt walkway past the allotment that a consortium of Newham’s OAPs had got off the developers who’d seen it as a convenient way to appease the local planning committee. Twist had to hand it to the old folks. They had perfected a kind of subsistence farming not seen since the last world war. He wondered if any of them were asleep now in the shed they’d built behind a stand of bamboo. He knew they got fucked up in there on gin and sometimes slept it off on an old mattress in the corner.

  The towers of E12 loomed from the darkness in the middle distance. There were no lights among the condemned blocks of Newham’s derelict council estate but the crunch of shattered safety glass always told him he was close. He never felt quite safe until he was inside the lift shaft, climbing the rope to the sixth floor which was the only floor that could not be accessed by the stairs and had not been scarred by successive waves of vandals, junkies and tramps who came in to light their fires, cook up and shelter from the rain.

  He slowed as he approached the fire escape at the rear of the block and looked up at the work that marked his break from Snark. He called it ‘The Matador’ and it was a work in progress. Just as he’d promised himself inside Beltham, he’d begun copying famous paintings from memory and he was guilty of stealing this one from Picasso.

  It showed a man fighting a bull. The man wore a matador’s cap and had two swords raised above his head pointing downwards at a raging bull whose horns were coming up at him from below. It was a simple painting, more like a sketch that Picasso had completed in charcoal, but it had struck a chord in Twist.

  He’d found the picture originally in a book in Newham public library. Unable to take out the book without a library card he’d stared at it until it was stuck, then taken it back to the tower wondering where he was going to put it. The tower had been an obvious choice. It was pale grey and had been pounded by the elements until it was off-white. The buildings were around a hundred feet tall but were strangely narrow and the side walls had no windows. To Twist’s mind they’d become the pages of a giant sketchbook as he’d gone about burning wood to make the dustbins full of powdered charcoal he’d needed to recreate Picasso’s masterwork.

  Working at night, swinging from a rope fastened securely to the winch that had once drawn the tower block’s lift, Twist had struggled to overcome the nagging sensation that someone who didn’t want him to succeed was watching.

  As he fastened a karabiner to the ring on the winch that held the cables and pulled his belay out he found it hard to believe that it was nearly finished. It bore such a close resemblance to the original despite only working from powers of recall, returning each day to the library to commit another part of the painting to his memory.

  Looping the rope onto his right foot he began to ratchet himself up the lift shaft to the engine room at the top. Assuming none of the junkies or one of Ake Bumbola’s crew could free climb the stainless steel walls of the lift shaft he would be safe inside the room he had come to think of as his own.

  He lay down on the dirty mattress he had hauled hand over fist up the shaft, attached to the rope. He had mixed feelings about the Matador. It was his best work and he wanted people to see it but not the wrong people. If they caught him now he would not be sent back to juvenile court. He would go before Newham Crown Court and wind up with a stretch in adult prison.

  He opened his bag and reached for the book the vicar had given him, Lives of the Great Artists, the title embossed in gold leaf on the front cover. It looked seriously old. It could almost be from the time of its author, Vasari, an artist who’d lived in the days of Da Vinci and Michelangelo and written about their life and times without envy or flattery.

  ‘Few are called and fewer are chosen,’ the old man had whispered to him, handing him the old book after Twist had shown him his sketch books in which he had made his initial studies of The Matador. He had seen the old man’s bushy eyebrows arch in surprise when he’d opened the book and seen the quality of the initial drawings and the scale of the challenge he had set himself in reproducing it.

  Twist reached for the side of the mattress and felt for the corners of a car battery. He hooked a wire loop around the positive so he could light up his room and stare at the walls. He’d painted pre-Raphaelite nymphs on them that reminded him of some of the angels in the stained-glass windows of the church and his mind drifted back to the vicar warning him that he had until sunrise to shelter with him before police would return with a warrant that no amount of medieval litigation could protect him from.

  There were no get out of jail free cards for parole breakers. The prosecution would brand him a vandal and treat the jury to an estimated cost of his so called ‘street art’ to the taxpayer, money that would better have been spent on sick children or war veterans than on sandblasting the walls and trains that he had defaced.

  He opened the pages of the old book, moving from front to back, from one illustration to the next. To his surprise, many of the images were of saints, tortured in horrible and grisly ways, and he thought about the great artists who had painted them and wondered if the world had been more violent then. He flicked on, staring at the portraits of their cruel-mouthed patrons, the Borgias and the Medicis scheming in their city states and stacking their silver ducats in their counting houses.

  He closed his eyes, breathed in and held the breath, letting the air out slowly, letting his mind relax. Half opening them he stared up at the cracked paint on the ceiling and wondered what real prison was like and if three square meals a day and running hot water might not be so bad. But then he felt his body sink and he became aware that he was floating as if on water, flat on his back in the canal, watching a fishing line twitch above him, and listening to Martin telling him to wake up and get out; the magistrate was climbing his tower on eight spider-like legs and was chewing up The Matador piece by piece and would soon cast a web around Twist’s room that he would never escape from again.

  11

  He stood at the end of the platform, shoulders hunched, wearing the green collars of his overcoat up to mask his face which was a mess of anxiety. The events following the White Cube debacle had wrought havoc with his sleep patterns, which were erratic at the best of times, and most mornings he’d woken up on the sofa nursing a flask of tuică, the moonshine he distilled in iron casks on the roof. Christ alone knew what it was doing to him. His blood pressure was up to one hundred and eighty. If he couldn’t find a replacement for Harry soon his head was going to explode.

  And rush hour didn’t help. It was an absurd time to go anywhere on the underground, let alone from Bank to Mile End at half past five on a Monday afternoon on an old fool’s errand, but the boy called Snark had convinced him.

  He knew a boy who was not only a tagger but also a street artist. ‘We used to run together but he got above himself …’ Snark had whispered conspiratorially to Fagin when he’d called him to tell Fagin about ‘the tagger formerly known as Twist’. A young man who was, in Snark’s opinion, ‘a mental assburgers case’ on account of his being able to look at a famous painting and reproduce it from memory on any wall using spray cans.

  Fagin never trusted a man without a motive and Snark was clearly riven with
envy, however unlikely his diagnosis of Twist’s high-functioning autism. It was possible that the wannabe artist might have a photographic memory but there was no way that a boy with severe autism could have escaped from Beltham Young Offender Institute or, for that matter, been sent there in the first place.

  But he was excited. Excited enough to put on his old green overcoat and a wide-brimmed waxed hat and walk out into the wind and the rain in search of a former child prodigy who, again if Snark was to be believed, could both recall shapes, colours, tones, proportions and the very essence of a scene and copy it from memory after a single sitting and outrun prison guards to escape from borstal.

  To find such a freak when Fagin needed him most felt more than serendipitous. It felt as if his destiny might finally have woken, got up off its arse and come knocking on the door of the derelict hotel in the reclaimed marshland that lay between Beckton’s sewage and gas works. It had been his headquarters for the past fifteen years and he had not enjoyed the location, the hotel keeling slowly to one side as it subsided gradually beneath the water table. And so he was on his way to meet Snark on the mean streets of Newham to see for his own eyes the miracle of a boy who might be the key to the plan that might, finally resurrect their flagging fortunes.

  And Christ knows they needed it. Morale in the gang had sunk to an all-time low. Dodge, Batesy and Cribb were monosyllabic and Red had exploded then disappeared for forty-eight hours. Only Sikes was motivated, appearing early the morning after Red had finally reappeared to bang Fagin awake where he’d fallen asleep, face down on his desk, to inform him of ‘the score to end all scores’.

  Fagin could see that Sikes was back. It didn’t matter any more that he was lame. He had brought the money and that, in simple terms, meant that now he was the money. Fagin reflected on this power shift but there was nothing that could be done about it now when the demands of the task ahead were more pressing. In the eyes of the gang it would simply not be enough to replace Harry. In Red’s eyes nothing would fill the gap he had left behind and it was her sense of loss and betrayal that bothered Fagin most of all.