about going too far, will you?”
Shelley briefly considered pressing the point—So what if I do?—then decided against. He made a show of saying goodbye to Bennett and Gurney and that was it. He put Guy Drake’s mansion, with its twisted metal gates and so many memories, to his back, and headed for home.
He had a job to do.
CHAPTER 54
ALTHOUGH GRANDFATHER LIKED to watch his films from the machine shop every now and then, in the afternoon he mostly preferred to watch soap operas, especially the Australian ones: Neighbours and Home and Away were his favorites.
Around him that afternoon there had been a great deal of activity. He’d heard talk of a snatch, some woman apparently. And dimly, amidst a general irritation at the constant noise that interrupted his viewing, he had wondered if his skills might be called upon.
It had been a long time since he’d worked on a woman. It would be good to get the chance. Still, he had no intention of broaching the subject with his idiot grandson Dmitry. That boy had no idea of the old ways. To him the camps and Gulag were something ripped from the history books, as distant and remote to him as Jack the Ripper was to the East Enders of London. Dmitry’s idea of the relationship between fear and power was vague and received. He could have no concept of terror’s potent hold because he had never experienced it for himself. Dmitry believed that his old grandfather and even his father were men out of time; to him their means of keeping order were an anachronism, embarrassing like coarse manners.
Neither did he know of the sheer pleasure one could experience by inflicting such intense pain. That in itself was a form of power. Grandfather saw how Dmitry and his ilk would react. Men who carried guns and used their fists with impunity, men of violence, would wince and pale when he produced his instruments. His art was too much even for them. He took them to places they’d rather not go, and doing that conferred upon him an even greater authority.
And of course they thought he was stupid because that’s what the young think. They couldn’t see past the trembling hands, defective hearing, and battered eyesight. They interpreted a slowing of thought as a decline in intelligence. They paid lip service to the idea of experience, but that’s all it was because secretly they believed all their bright ideas were new ones.
Think of me as a dinosaur all you want, Dmitry, but this organization was built upon the rusted blade of my saw. Relic I might be, totem I definitely am.
Later on, things began to calm down. There was less noise. Fewer folk coming and going. Once more Grandfather was able to concentrate on the television. He had increased the volume to a near-ear-splitting level as a form of protest, but now he reached for the control and returned it to its normal setting.
Still, he thought. It would have been interesting to make this woman’s acquaintance. What fun he might have had.
And so his spirits rose when one of the men came to him shortly after dark, entering the front room tentatively, as they all did, bowing and showing his respect, as they all did, and said, “I have been asked if you would like to accompany me to the machine shop, Ded.”
Grandfather enjoyed the effect his smile had on these underlings. “Dmitry?” he asked.
“No, Ded. It is Mrs. Kraviz who asks if you would come to the machine shop. She has a task she thinks you might enjoy. She has asked me to inform you that it is her gift to you, as a sign of respect.”
Now, this was a lot better, thought Grandfather. Dmitry’s wife Karen was a Londoner and spoke like cor blimey, guv’nor, but she had a toughness Grandfather admired.
Like most of them in the organization, he detested the Regans and longed for the day the merger would become a takeover. But unlike his grandson he knew there were things they could learn from the old-fashioned gangsters. The Regans knew how to keep their house in order. The Regans had gone down the path that Dmitry wanted to take. They had seen the error of their ways. They had corrected their route.
“Get my coat,” he said, already looking forward to the task ahead. “Oh, and I will also need my instruments, I take it?”
“Mrs. Kraviz has asked me to tell you that your instruments are waiting