Somebody had propped a mannequin against the wall at the top of the stairs. They'd given him a rubber bin Laden mask. An unlit cigarette dangled from the mouth, and he was plastered with lipstick and eye-shadow. The finishing touch was a pair of fake women's breasts, the sort the local dickhead would wear while cooking a barbecue.
A rough Jock voice came from a room at the far end. I followed it. That door was missing too. The ones either side of it were intact and closed. From behind them came the rhythmic pounding of mattress springs and a chorus of moans and groans.
The open room was piled high with six packs of plastic two-litre water-bottles. The bare floorboards were riddled with holes. The wood was splintered inwards. No wonder weapons weren't allowed downstairs. Punters who'd come up for a shag would have ended up with their bollocks shot off. Not much repeat business in that.
The walls were plastered with more pictures and magazine cuttings. The connecting door to my right seemed to be a shrine to Jonathan 'Jack' Idema. I remembered him. He'd become world news when he'd got caught running his own private interrogation centre a few years ago. During his trial, he said he'd been given a passport and visa by an unnamed American agency. He claimed he'd been fitted up – the FBI was out to get him because he refused to name the sources who had tipped him off about a nuclear smuggling operation in Lithuania.
Idema might have been away with the fairies, but his victims weren't. The pictures on the door showed what the police had found inside his homemade torture chamber. Three Afghans hung upside down from the ceiling, naked and totally covered with blisters and burns from boiling water. Another eighteen or nineteen were found dead in a trunk. They'd crammed the poor fuckers in there and locked the lid. Three more were in a cupboard, their flesh whipped raw.
The pictures could have come straight from the Yes Man's folder.
62
The shrine shifted suddenly as the connecting door opened. One of the girls came out carrying a red plastic bowl, some liquid soap and an old grey towel that had probably once been white.
The picture on the door was now at an angle but I could still see our mate Jack in court, pointing and ranting from the dock. He had a beard, and wore sunglasses and combat fatigues with US flags stitched all over them. I remembered him claiming he'd been working for the US government and had received orders from Donald Rumsfeld. Nothing to do with multimillion- dollar bounties, of course. Fuck it, I might still have a go myself when this was over.
I passed the door to see a stained stripy mattress. Sprawled across it, an overweight and hairy white man scratched his bollocks with one hand and smoked with the other. Next to his pile of clothes on the floor, a used condom leaked its contents.
'Stu?'
His well-fed head lifted from the mattress long enough for him to suck in another lungful of nicotine. 'Fuck off.' His French accent certainly didn't belong to a Stu.
I carried on to the end of the corridor.
'Stu?'
The guy in the open room was playing chess with a young local lad, maybe fifteen at a push. Their board lay across a couple of cases of Miller Lite.
His head jerked up. 'Aye?'
It was a challenge, not an answer, and it came straight from the Gorbals. He had a wiry grey barnet and a beard that needed a good trim. So did his nostril hair, which grew straight into his moustache. He was early sixties, with pale skin and a nose that had been broken so many times it was almost flat. I nodded appreciatively at his blue Hawaiian shirt. 'Nice. The guy from downstairs sent me. I'm looking for a short. I was in the Gandamack and—'
'I know.' His eyes were back on the chessboard but he put up a hand. 'They called. The two of them want to shoot up for free if I sell you something. What am I? A fucking charity?' His head came up slowly. 'You people, you never give up, do you? Why have you come all this fucking way? English, I suppose?'
His attention went back to the chessboard. The white pieces were carved soldiers, Western-style, with helmets and body armour.
He stood up and waffled in local to the boy. Whatever he was saying, it sounded along the