After a week I had run out of security companies to approach. The only ones that were left paid so little I would barely be able to afford a rental on a small apartment, let alone a mortgage on a house.
Another week and I was getting worried. So I began spreading my net wider to large, five-star hotels and exclusive clubs, but always I received the same polite refusal.
On the Friday of the third week desperation was beginning to set in. I was at the offices of Allied Security Solutions, at 260 on East 161st Street, between Walgreens and Checkers. The company was on the ninth floor, and the view from their personnel department’s window was depressing, like a painting by a dispirited Cubist who had nothing left on his palette but gray, beige and a nameless mixture of the two.
The guy across the desk from me, Dick Van Dreiver, was big and hard, with a platinum crew cut and pale blue eyes that had looked at death and seen it as an opportunity. He wore an expensively vulgar double-breasted Italian suit that whispered cruel things every time he moved.
When he’d finished looking at my resume, he dropped it on the desk and smiled like we were about to share a joke. His accent was South African.
“You know what I’m gonna say, right? You know, if it was up to me I’d snap you up in a second. I know how valuable guys like you are. But I am gonna be straight with you, chum. You are not going to get the kind of work you want in this city, or any major city, for that matter. I mean...” He picked up the resume and waved it at me. “You’re an amazing guy. But you resigned, and they won’t write you a letter of recommendation beyond, ‘Yuh, he was in the regiment.’ Where is your commanding officer’s reference?” He leaned forward. “You left under a cloud and they gave you the option of resigning rather than an expensive, embarrassing court martial. What did you do? Shoot somebody you oughtn’t?”
I didn’t answer and he sighed. “I know, it sucks. Eight years of devoted service and this is the thanks. But look.” He dropped the resume on the desk. “There is a lot of highly paid work out there for a man with your skills and talents.”
“Yeah, I know, but I don’t want to be a mercenary. I know what happens out there and I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“Fair enough. I get that. It’s part of the reason I am sitting behind this desk. But you don’t need to go that far. I can give you a private recommendation for a job I happen to know pays damned well, and doesn’t involve raiding small villages and murdering innocent people.”
I frowned. The slight flippancy of his tone grated on me. “What kind of job?”
He raised his palm and gave me a warning look. “Now, hear me out. You’d start as a doorman at a club.” I laughed and made to stand, but he stopped me. “It pays a grand a week as a starting salary, rising to two grand if you pass the probation period of a month. And the employer’s creative with the way he approaches tax, so most of your pay goes where it belongs, in your pocket.”
I sat and scowled at him. “A grand a week, for a doorman?”
“Yuh, well, I’m guessing we are neither of us naive, Mr. Bauer, and obviously what we are looking at here is a position as a bodyguard. Your potential employer, Peter Rusanov, recently purchased a club, here in the Bronx. The previous owners attracted what we might call a very varied clientele. You had Hollywood actors, judges, the mayor...” He shook his head. “I even saw a senator in there once, and they are all rubbing fucking shoulders with drug traffickers and gang members with skulls tattooed on their foreheads. To say the club is lucrative is the understatement of the century. The declared turnover is in the millions. The actual turnover is a hundred times higher, because they are not selling just champagne, right?”
He shrugged, spread his hands and sat nodding for a while.
“Now, obviously a joint like that carries a risk element, and the last owner was killed. So, along comes Russian businessmen Peter Rusanov and he sees the potential of this place, but he also sees the risk. So he plays it smart. He leaves the running of the place in the hands of the local gang, an outfit that goes by the name of the Chupa Cabras, but he also gets himself a praetorian guard composed of ex-special forces veterans, whose loyalty he knows he can rely on, provided he pays them well.”
I stared at him for a long moment. “You’re offering me a job as a bodyguard to a Russian Mafia boss.”
He shrugged again and pulled down the corners of his mouth. “I have no idea if he is Russian Mafia or not, and frankly, I don’t give a shit. You’re not in the army now, Mr. Bauer, and they will not look after you anymore. They betrayed you and these are the options they have left open for you. Take it or leave it.”
I sank back in my chair. My house in London was nowhere near being sold. My bank account was approaching critical numbers and I was nowhere close to finding a job that paid anything like the kind of salary I needed. And Van Dreiver was right. The bottom line was that, even if Byrd, Bradley, Jones and Skinner had stayed loyal to me, the army had betrayed me, stabbed me in the back and hung me out to dry. I was out of options.
But even as I said the words to myself, in my mind, I could see Bradley’s diabolical face, bathed in firelight under the black sky of the desert, his eyes reflecting the dancing flames, his mouth twisted into a daemon smile.
“You’re never out of options, boy. You’re just out of imagination.”
And then the idea came to me and I smiled.
“OK, Van Dreiver, you have a deal. When do I go and see this guy?”
“You don’t. First you’ll see the manager of the bar. It’s called the Mescal, on Park Avenue, in South Bronx, Mott Haven. You know it?”
“Yeah, I know it.”
He picked up the phone. “I’ll make the call, you go over right now.”
Chapter Three
The Mescal Club was located just where East 135th Street becomes Park Avenue. It’s no secret, at least not to me, that the super rich and powerful in this world have a dark side. They like to get down and dirty sometimes. They like to slum it and flirt with the squalid and the dangerous. The Mescal Club was the ideal place to do just that.
It was essentially a converted warehouse, set back from a dirty road, in a large parking lot beside the railway tracks. In stark contrast to the filthy street, the graffiti, the dumpsters and the chain-link fences, the club itself sported a purple awning trimmed in gold, a gold logo representing a peyote bud, two large potted palms flanking the door and a short strip of red carpet. There was no Renaissance fountain depicting Poseidon with a bunch of dolphins, but you felt there ought to be.
When I got there it was six PM. The door was open, but it was quiet. I stepped into a lobby carpeted in red, with a small mahogany counter on the right. There was nobody behind it right then, but I could see a door to a cloakroom that had no cloaks in it. On the left there was a short flight of stairs, also of mahogany and also carpeted in red. Ahead there were heavy, padded doors. I went to them and pushed through.
It was a large space with a high ceiling. A long, shiny bar made a dogleg from the left wall to the rear. There was a lot of booze behind the bar, and something told me they sold most of it most nights. To the right of it, six broad, wooden steps rose to a lounge area with sofas and big padded chairs. And against the right-hand wall there was a stage with steel poles where I figured the girls danced.