He offered me a doughnut from a plate piled high before him. I took two, and left the rest for him.
‘I just checked with the networks; our advance booking figures for the pay-per-view have set a new record in Europe for any event. Counting the UK, Germany, Holland, Poland, Italy, France and Spain we have three and a half million buys.’
‘What’s that in cash?’ I asked him.
‘Seventy-two million dollars, my man, of which sum a shade over twenty-five million comes to the Global Wrestling Alliance.’
I stared at him; for all the weeks I had been working for Everett, I had no idea that his business could generate that sort of cash.
‘Taken together, the European market’s still not as big as America. Now you understand what Tony Reilly has to lose?’
For the first time, I did. ‘With that at stake,’ I said, ‘whatever it takes to protect this event, you do it.’
‘And what do you say that is, Mr Detective?’ he growled, guessing my answer in advance.
‘First, we tell the police what’s been happening. Either you agree to that or I’m out the door now. I’ve been playing hide and seek with the law on this assignment for long enough. I know a guy on the Serious Crimes Squad — Mike Dylan, Susie Gantry’s boyfriend. I’m seeing him tonight, and I want your authority to tell him what’s been happening.’
He looked at me doubtfully. ‘I mean it, Everett,’ I told him. ‘You let me tell Mike or you’re getting yourself a new announcer for Wednesday.’
He shrugged those great shoulders. ‘Fair enough,’ I said. I stood up, turned and walked to the door. I was in the act of turning the handle, when I heard him sigh behind me.
‘Yeah, okay,’ he conceded. ‘You can talk to him. But ask him to be discreet, please.’
‘Thanks. Of course I will.’ I went back to my seat, and picked up what was left of my first doughnut. ‘Next, I think you should hire a good security firm to do a complete check of the arena, before the spectators are admitted. I take it that you’ll have a full house?’
‘Hell yes! We sold out this one a month in advance. This Ingliston place ain’t the biggest arena, but it’ll look great on screen.’
‘That’s good. Third, every piece of equipment that’s going to be used on Wednesday has to be checked personally by you. No more lethal turn-buckle pads, please.’
He shook his head. ‘No, that I guarantee. I’ll go over everything with Alex Kruger, the special effects controller.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘You never seen him? He works for our television contractor; it’s his job to make sure all the whiz-bangs go off exactly on time. Our road crew install them, he fires them with remote devices.’
I frowned at him. ‘Are you sure he’s okay?’
‘Yeah, no doubt about it. He couldn’t possibly have had access to the barrier that hurt Liam, or to the turn-buckle pad. Don’t worry about him.’
‘Listen mate,’ I told him, ‘until this show’s over on Wednesday, you should worry about everyone.’
Chapter 50
The Horseshoe Bar is one of the last great unreconstructed pubs in Glasgow; not a plastic saloon with a list of designer beers and no draught worth the name, not a surplus-to-requirements banking hall staffed by smart young people in suits. No, the Horseshoe is a genuine, well maintained boozer with a polished wooden bar-top, a ripping good pint of lager and the best pie, beans and chips in town.
Dylan was there before me; ten minutes before me, he complained, but I had seen him stepping through the door as I turned the corner out of Renfield Street. No matter; since he was there first I let him buy the first round.
It being early on a Monday evening, the place was nothing like busy, but I took my lager nonetheless and motioned Mike to follow me to a table in a quiet corner near the door. ‘You changed your habits?’ he said. ‘I thought you were a stand-at-the-bar type.’
‘So I am,’ I told him. ‘But I want to talk to you, professional-like, and I don’t want anyone ear-holing us.’
He looked at me, suddenly suspicious. ‘Professionally? I can’t talk to you about my job, Oz. You know that.’
‘No, Michael,’ I said patiently. ‘I talk, you listen. Got it?’ Mollified, he nodded.
‘Good. What I have to say to you is on behalf of my client Everett Davis. I’ve been working for him undercover for the last few weeks. That’s what the ring announcer stuff has been all about.’
Dylan stared at me, in a mixture of mock amazement and outrage. ‘Have you been playing coppers again?’ he asked. It was surprisingly near the mark for him. A few weeks before I would have joked along with him, but I didn’t have the patience any more.
‘Don’t be fucking stupid, man,’ I snapped at him. ‘I’ve been working on a confidential basis, trying to determine whether certain suspicions which Everett had were justified. There’s no longer any doubt that they are, and so, acting on my advice, my client has now agreed that I should tell you, as a member of the Serious Crimes Squad, what’s been going on.’
I paused. ‘That’s how your report will begin, right?’ He smiled gently and nodded.
‘Okay, here’s the position. Everett is convinced that an American rival,Tony Reilly, of an organisation called Championship Wrestling Incorporated, has suborned someone in his employ to sabotage GWA shows and ruin his relationship with the television networks which are his customers.
‘There have been four incidents in all; two of them deliberate acts beyond doubt.’ I described the incidents in detail, from the rigged tape cassettes to Jerry Gradi’s near-fatal shooting in the ring in Barcelona, leaving nothing out, not even Prim’s sudden life-saving appearance.
All the flippancy had gone from my friend by the time I had finished. ‘Didn’t the Spanish police react?’ he asked.
‘I thought they would, but the ambulance crew told the surgeons that it was a wrestling injury. No one thought to take it further.’
‘It’s been a few weeks since then, though. Big Daze has been a bit backward in coming forward — and so have you, mate.’
I shot him a look that would have cut steel. ‘Sorry, Oz,’ he said at once. ‘You’ve had other things on your mind.’
‘Of which more later,’ I grunted. ‘Everett is very sensitive about this. His business is high-risk, but it generates millions of whatever currency you’d like to name, and billions of some of them. For a while we thought we were going to be able to hand you the whole thing on a plate.
‘I was in the States last week checking out our prime suspect, but we were wrong. It wasn’t him.’ I told him about Sonny Leonard and my trip to St Louis. ‘The guy is off the list, Mike. It just wasn’t him.
‘Which means,’ I concluded, ‘that we’re scratching around for a culprit. Everett’s convinced that it’s an American.’
‘And you?’ asked Dylan, ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s not me, that I can tell you. And it’s not Everett, or Jerry Gradi, or Liam Matthews — or Sally Crockett. Other than that, to be honest, I haven’t a clue. The only things I do know are that we’ve got a fully live event coming up on Wednesday evening and that the person behind these four incidents is still out there.’
The detective nodded. ‘Yes, and we also know that he’s got some skill with firearms, as well as access to a nasty wee piece of hardware. There are far more of these mini-pistols in circulation than you’ll ever hear us admit.’
He looked at me, suddenly sharper and more serious than I had ever seen him. ‘What does Everett want from us, Oz?’
‘The ball’s in your court,’ I told him. ‘I’ve told you about the situation; you’re the copper.’
‘Okay,’ said Dylan. ‘Suppose I go in tomorrow and tell my boss all about this. Has it occurred to you that there’s a possibility that he might have the Wednesday event called off?’
‘No it hasn’t. Why would he do that?’
‘Threat to public safety.’
‘But there hasn’t been a threat to the public.’
‘Jesus, you’ve had a guy shot in the ring. That sounds threatening enough to me.’