Track 1
1 The Market Place
Freddie Forrester’s problems started when they sentenced him to death. Second problem was nobody told him.
That morning he’d hightailed three hours across the island to Rodadora, the town he’d hoped never to see again, missing out on his eleven o’clock coffee and Danish, because his cousin Sid had sent a shit-scared message, saying he needed to meet, urgent. Something life-threatening, it seemed.
Freddie was up to his eyes in hustle and Sid was a klutz, but family was family. Right now though, Freddie stood in the middle of the town’s market square – Sid was late – caffeine and patisserie withdrawal was kicking in – and Freddie was concluding he might happily whack Sid himself.
Thing was, for some months Freddie was growing disillusioned with his chosen career of drugs baron. He’d tried to be a good mobster, treated his clients nice and his gang nicer. He could command people as effectively by smiling as shooting them in the knee, though he’d do that also if he had to. But he was in his mid-thirties already and the long hours were getting to him.
Retiring was not something you did lightly. Not as a mobster. He’d be putting a target on his back for everyone who held a grudge, or even disagreed with his choice of beverage. He had to do it quickly. Like ditching a girlfriend. He’d take his crew for an expensive dinner, maybe, tell them it’s not them, it’s him. No hard feelings. And make like Houdini. Small cottage somewhere in the hills. Just him and his sister. Tending fruit trees and playing dominos with neighbours outside the village bar.
He counted to ten. Then twenty. He used to love this little town where he grew up, beaten into submission by the Caribbean sun. He hated what it had become. Hated the few shoppers meandering between the dusty trestle tables, looking with jaundiced eyes at tomatoes and avocados, tortoise-wrinkled as the farmers selling them. The freshest produce was a pile of heavy metal CDs. At the far end of the square, half a dozen layabouts in torn T-shirts bothered a football. Three workmen stood on the other side, scratching their heads over a hole in the road that seemed to astonish them by existing.
Freddie’s intestines griped. Something didn’t fit. His gut was an Alpine weather house: sometimes the good weather guy came out, sometimes the bad. Today was dyspepsia.
He looked to his main wingman, leaning against a palm tree, pointed at his watch. Pontiac nodded in agreement. A big man, with a small moustache and an evil glint, not the brightest star in the sky, but he liked money. Freddie trusted people most when he knew their motivations. Freddie’s two other bodyguards glanced up from where they were playing Candy Crush on their mobiles.
The CD stallholder had fallen asleep on his stool, chin on his chest, like an old balloon, with the air leaked from inside him. Next to him, a dozen 7-Ups and Fantas sat tepid in a bucket. Freddie took three and tossed them to his men, who drank gratefully.
The stallholder gave a shudder, but didn’t wake. Freddie pushed a large banknote into the old man’s shirt pocket. Too generous, but… Four local children saw their chance and pounced, hands out. Freddie gave them a can each. They ran off giggling.
‘Say thank you, you little egg-suckers,’ he called, but they disappeared out the square, doubtless headed for their gang HQ. He remembered the hideouts from when he’d grown up here – one beside the broken-down bus station; another behind the school; his posse in the graveyard. Good times – until they weren’t.
But still his insides griped.
The footballers stopped playing. The road-menders stopped mending. The market square went quiet. Cousin Sid the klutz, Freddie realised, wasn’t coming. That was what you got for being caring.
He straightened an AxMan Flyn CD with his left hand and slid the other hand into his jacket. He caught Pontiac’s eye. Pontiac was reaching for the back of his belt.
‘The footballers,’ Pontiac said quietly.
‘And the road-menders,’ Freddie said. ‘Nobody cares that much about a pothole.’ For a long moment, nothing moved, except a turkey vulture circling overhead.
The first bullet shot shattered a Celtic Spring disc next to Freddie’s hand. Five black-clad snipers bobbed up from where they’d been hiding on the town hall roof and laid down a pattern of fire.
‘Shit!’ Pontiac said. Freddie could only agree.
The footballers and road-menders dropped what they weren’t doing and pulled out hand guns. As bullets whipped past him, Freddie upended the CD table and dived behind it. Discs flew. Pontiac joined him, banging his knee, swearing. The stallholder opened his eyes.
‘Here!’ Freddie beckoned him from the ground, but the dumbass sat frozen with fear. Pontiac grabbed him by the shirt lapels and dragged him down.
The other gang members scrambled for cover. The footballers and road-menders fired as they advanced. The old man looked from side to side, dazed like he’d found himself in a movie. Next to Freddie, three Live Aid albums and the AxMan Flyn CD exploded in a shower of silver fragments. No respect for art.
He did a quick stocktake – they were outnumbered and the nearest shelter was a café, over a hundred metres away. A born pessimist, Freddie’s philosophy could be summed up as: things usually get worse. But this was more worse than usual.
Instinctively, he reached out and scooped a handful of remaining CDs to safety. Then he made a decision. He pulled out his phone, speed-dialled. A woman’s voice answered, but before Freddie could speak, he heard running feet and a police assault rifle pressed against the side of his head. He took a deep breath.
‘One minute,’ he said to the muzzle. ‘I’m on the phone to the president.’
2 Turnip Island
Freddie loved and hated the island of his birth in equal measure. The Caribbean climate was sweet and the island generous – or at least it had been before an English privateer landed in the 1500s. Sir Roland de Fois inspected its peaceful bays and teeming jungle and christened it Benkuda, which was the islanders’ word for turnip. Historians argue whether he named it for its shape or because he asked a passing hunter-gatherer where he was and the man thought he wanted lunch.
Sir Roland promptly declared his new discovery to be his favourite place in the world and proved his love by ripping up the forests in search of gold he was sure was there and whacking the locals when he didn’t find it. He then died of fever, contracted from an insect bite. Ironically, the islanders could have given him the cure, but he’d just killed them.
The Englishman’s tough love would be echoed over the centuries by thousands who washed ashore this vegetable-shaped smear in the ocean. Among them were Freddie Forrester’s own ancestors. They’d hoped to make their fortunes, but their sole talent turned out to be growing just enough stumpy plants to survive and pass on their DNA.
Freddie and his sister Dania were born in the north of the island, which was famed at the time for its luxuriant explosion of flowers and its markets crammed with fruit. As kids they played among the laden stalls and scrumped for snacks in sweet-smelling orchards. But when Freddie was eight, the then president took over the land around the town and gave it to his nephew, a young man who believed himself to be God’s gift to the world of agribusiness.
The new landowner diverted the river to water his sugar plantation and feed the lake in his gardens of his country house, which he called Versails, being crap at spelling. The town’s orchards shrivelled. The fields grew brown. Many farmers gave up, took underpaid jobs spraying pesticides on the nephew’s sugar cane, but the Forresters struggled on with their patch, paying higher and higher taxes to keep the nephew in the luxury he felt he deserved.
Freddie hated watching his parents grow hunched over with poverty. The landowner sat on their backs, a parasitic hippopotamus. Finally, at fifteen, Freddie slung his few belongings in a bag and headed south for the capital and what he called “real life” - promising his sister he’d send her a ticket once he could afford it.
Trouble was, real life wasn’t so easy. After a long search, he found himself a discarded hut in a slum overlooking the sea. He loved that hut. The wood had rotted and it sloped to one side, but it was his own and he had to answer to no-one.
Over the days and weeks, he repaired and furnished it. When he wasn’t there, he worked from five in the morning to eleven at night to earn enough to eat. Jobs in the city paid so little that most people had three. He cleaned, helped in a tobacco shop, and evenings he delivered groceries to the well-heeled.
One day, he was busy washing down toilets in one of the city centre hotels when a young man darted in. He was not much older than Freddie and came with a cloud of expensive aftershave that made Freddie gag. The man thrust a pistol and a bag into Freddie’s hands, told him to keep his mouth shut, and ran off.
One minute later, armed police burst into the toilets and arrested Freddie for not being the drug dealer they were searching for. He started to say about the other man, but the nearest cop lamped him in the face and told him to keep his mouth shut. He smelt of the same aftershave.
Five years later, Freddie walked out of the city prison after serving his sentence for packing a weapon and holding a ki of cocaine. The first thing he saw was a rusty Cadillac, sitting low on bust springs. A thick aroma of aftershave drifted out of the driver’s window. The young gangster beckoned him over, gave him a significant wad in gratitude and offered him a place in his crew, where he said Freddie could rise high.
Freddie was a polite young man. He thanked him, but declined. The gangster looked surprised, but Freddie had learned many things in prison. First, he’d learned how crime worked. Second, he learned he wasn’t a team player. He liked bossing people around too much. Third, he’d become friends with Dr Woolworth Tensing.
A successful GP, Woolworth was an angry rake-like man, whose parents, like many Benkudans, liked to name their children after their favourite brands. He’d been banged up for failing to cure the president’s sciatica and had spent his time in the pen studying the war on drugs.
‘It’s a fool’s war,’ he’d tell Freddie at night over a glass of smuggled hooch. ‘Every human on the planet takes drugs, whether coke or paracetamol. Or hooch. All a fucking war does is drive up the price and kill people.’
Thinking about Tensing’s words as he lay awake nights, Freddie had a vision: if he could sell his yayo with less violence than the others, everyone gained. The rich people of New York and London would be happy putting his merchandise up their noses.
With the money they paid, Freddie would employ the poor people he’d lived among, paying them better than they would ever make at their three jobs a day. He’d call it Forrester Income Benefit.
3 The Aviary
The morning after the ambush, Freddie didn’t feel much benefit, handcuffed in the cells below the presidential palace, wondering what would become of his DNA and shivering at the sight, through the bars, of the presidential aviary.
Rearing over the trees of the palace gardens, the aviary formed a dark pyramid, a brooding shape, whose fame relied less on the exotic birds than that President Isobel Bachman liked to eliminate her inconvenient citizens there. Though it stood at least two hundred metres away, Freddie was sure he could see dried bloodstains glinting low down on the black metalwork.
The cell door rattled open and two guards shoved Freddie out into the corridor. The guards pushed him forward towards a flight of grimy stone stairs. As they went, Freddie tried not to look at more brown stains that spattered the walls and steps, giving off a sharp aroma that could have been cleaning fluid or blood.
In silence, the police guards marched them up the steps to a heavy steel door that led to the outside and the grim black aviary beyond. They stopped. Freddie stiffened himself ready for them to unlock the bolts and take him out.
But then the lead guard indicated the opposite direction, into the ground floor of the palace. Up one more flight of presidential stairs, down another presidential corridor and Freddie found him ushered into the presidential office, pushed over to stand in the freezing air-conditioned air, facing the empty presidential desk.
Two armed commandos entered, stamped, waited for the prison guards to leave and stood to attention either side of him. Expensive paintings hung on the walls, many procured by him to keep the president sweet. But of President Isobel Bachman, nothing was to be seen.
He glared at the two commandos, members of the presidential commando squad who’d been sent to kill him.
A minute later they were joined by two more presidential thugs and another prisoner.
He eyed Freddie. ‘You?’ Freddie didn’t deign to reply. He hated people who stated the obvious. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Forrester?’
Lucky Strike Morton. Lucky Strike ran the Sunshine Cartel, based around the docks, the largest and most violent of the mobs. He was tall, red-faced with designer stubble, and wore a polo shirt and jeans, which strained to hold in the flesh, so business must have been good, but right now he looked like he wanted to rip out someone’s heart and barbecue it with onions.
‘I was going to ask the same.’
‘I went to meet a man.’
‘So did I.’
‘About a deal. Twenty kilos of yayo – good price too. You?’
‘A cousin being given some grief.’
Lucky laughed. ‘Typical. Fucking Mother Teresa! Not even something you might make some green out of.’
Freddie felt his jaw tighten. ‘Clearly we were both misled.’
‘Sodding cops.’ Lucky scratched parts of his anatomy. ‘What’s the point of paying them off if they start tricking and ambushing us? That’s no way to run a country.’
Before Freddie could find a reply, the door banged open and the captain of the SWAT team entered.
‘Stand up, ready for the president!’ he ordered.
‘I’m already standing,’ Freddie said, and the police captain laughed raucously. He was six foot six, broad in the chest, with a bucket jaw and steel-blue eyes. President Bachman seemed to recruit her palace police out of Men’s Vogue.
‘Then get fucking taller.’ He’d made the joke twenty times since the ambush and Freddie was tiring of it.
Freddie faced front. ‘Today’s filth have no respect for the business owner.’
Captain Bucket-Jaw raised the butt of his rifle to smack one Business Owner upside the head, but President Isobel Bachman bustled in. She stopped by her desk, laid her hand on a skyscraper of official papers and gazed at her two captives, like posing for a presidential photo-op.
‘Well, well, here you are!’ She smiled. Both Freddie and Lucky Strike had worked closely with her at election time, persuading rivals to consider their personal safety, but her smile was cooler than they were used to. ‘Thank you for your phone call, Mr Forrester. And thank you, Mr Morton, for surrendering too–’
‘I don’t never surrender,’ Lucky Strike broke in. ‘Florence Nightingale here might have surrendered. My gun jammed.’
‘Whatever. Those operations were expensive enough as it was.’
‘The operations to have us killed?’ Freddie asked delicately.
‘The very ones,’ answered the president. ‘We go back a long way, the three of us, but in politics everything is come and go… You came in very useful to me once. And now it’s time for you to go.’
