The Price You Pay Read online

That guy…I hate that guy.

  Yeah it’s me.

  OBVIOUSLY—EVERYONE KNOWS THIS NOW, YES?—obviously I’m not going round to Billy’s office with a hundred grand of cocaine in one of those spy-game metal suitcases because I do not propose to spend my life in jail. I don’t make deliveries. I outsource that. Used to be you used juveniles and a lot of the traditional dealers still do, but even though you won’t usually get a juvenile sent to real jail, if you use the same kids over and over they get a sense of who you are and how you work and then when they get popped that information tends to become public. Kids are loyal as hell but they’re also not stupid. They know when to turn you in and they actually don’t believe they can die so they’re not scared of you. Juvenile labour is a ticking time bomb plus it’s unethical. Those kids should be in school so that they don’t turn into tube crews and strippers. Which are both irreproachable careers in the abstract by the way but which owing to the deforming forces of late Neo-Liberal Oligarchy are professions whose outcomes are less desirable than those achievable by education and application and a small but crucial measure of luck.

  Plus this is the digital age. My deliveries are ride share. They are zero-hour gig-economy microjobs. You want to move a fifteen-kilo file box from the East Harbour to the Point? There is indeed an app for that. In fact there are a bunch of apps and websites and lists and peer-to-peer services, above-ground legitimate regular people ones like City Fetch, which runs collection errands for busy PAs, and 1brokeIT, which gets you a copy of something you accidentally destroyed so no one ever knows, and mesh-substrate private nets for executive couples seeking convivial third parties and white-collar fight clubs and addiction counseling. You do not care about the technical stuff, the point is this: why bother with maintaining a workforce when there’s any number of people who will work on a very occasional freelance basis, without knowing shit about who you are or who the end user is, especially if you can guarantee three things:

  a) They are not assisting in the commission of an act of terror. (Deal breaker. You have to make them really comfortable about that.)

  b) If they get caught they have plausible deniability. (Not that they assume that you’re doing anything wrong, man. But like, in case.)

  c) They get paid well for doing something they’d basically do anyway (like commuting, going for coffee in a nearby deli and meeting new people).

  You’re not inducting newbies into the shadowy world of international smuggling, you’re just allowing stand-up citizens to turn an existing downside of the personal economy into a revenue stream. Progress is golden and I am Amazon. I am Uber for illegal drugs. I have everyone from executives in Beemers to old codgers with Z frames running cocaine for me. They know really that this is what they are doing but as long as it is never confirmed they do not care because money and maybe frisson. I do not make them do things they don’t feel comfortable with. I do not serve areas those people would not like to go to. I only supply Billy and his tube crew because they work nice areas which is why that falling tube hit a Bichon Frise and not a homeless person. Think of it like I am Norwegian Airlines: I do not fly to any destination that is notably shittier than the airport you take off from.

  Today I am not even here to talk about cocaine. I’m inevitably going to talk about cocaine because Billy takes a lot of cocaine and people who do that like to talk about it, but I’m even less interested in talking about cocaine or Billy’s erection or Billy’s previous erection or the various fucking appalling places he chose to deploy that erection than I usually am. I am here to talk about Didi.

  Didi was about a thousand years old and looked older and she was bad-tempered and cranky and she smelled awful. She wore that spooky doll make-up that very old ladies wear. I met her once coming home and I honestly thought I’d walked into a horror movie. I thought her head was going to come off and bite my eyes out or she was going to explode and turn into cockroaches and they would crawl all over me. I hated Didi. I hated that she existed and she made my building smell weird and she hissed—like a cockroach she hissed—at my girlfriends when I brought them up here to look at the view and screw on the balcony and drink whisky and she called them loose women and me all kinds of words that meant I was bad. I do not blame her for that. She was right on pretty much all of that stuff. I liked that she was down there listening to me screw on the engineered hardwood with Danish models and hating me. I liked hating her and I was pretty sure it was mutual.

  Fuck but she was good value for money. If you were in the market for a real ancient monster like one of those clams in old movies that shuts on your hand just as the shark is coming she was one hundred per cent your girl. She was stubborn and mean and awful. And she didn’t even get in a few licks on whoever did it. You’d think she would but they were seriously intense about it. Didn’t touch her. Didn’t steal from her. Killed her. Not a sound. I slept through the whole thing.

  See and that gives me the fucking shits. Could they have done that to me? Is that the whole point? Is that the implication? If so it should come with a pointer in that direction because right now I’m at sea. Maybe it’s random. Fucking crazed killer acting all international hitman. Fantasy about being The Jackal and she’s the secret president of Atlantis, got to die or the sea people will eat Manhattan. I don’t know.

  Or maybe she was a target. Or maybe I was.

  I do not like that Didi is dead.

  So this is not my softer side or redemption calling, this is management.

  So I am talking to Billy. He is not my core client base any more precisely because he retains this connection with the lawbreaking motherfuckers of this city and very soon now it’s going to be time to cut Billy and his guys out of my loop. They were my first clients but our social circles and our interests may be diverging. Although on the other hand maybe Billy is coming with me, coming upscale. I’ve been working on that. If he were to redirect his energies the cocaine business with him would dry up naturally, without negative emotions on either side.

  Billy figures it is okay to tell me criminal stuff because he figures I must do a lot of murders in order to pursue my commercial project. This is the effect of television and cinema. In my business so long as you don’t do a lot of murders and you are careful and smart and you are not leading juveniles into despair and addiction and you are selling to senators and day traders, then no one cares. If the cops even notice you they have better things to do. And if they ever catch you, you cut a deal and they don’t have a problem with that because all you’ve ever done—assuming they can prove beyond a grain or two of it—is meet demand.

  I’m infrastructure. I’m substrate. I don’t make waves and I am polite. There’s no collateral from what I do. None at all. When they decriminalise—and they will—I will go from here to there without doing anything except sending Forbes a press release. Most likely half of them are on my list already but I don’t check. Client data is held on their own devices and double hashed because privacy is not something you tack onto a service it is something you build in. I am all about the seamless experience. I am not about noise.

  So I ask Billy about Didi.

  I say: Is anything going on right now?

  Like what? Like construction?

  Like warfare or something. Someone moving.

  Shakes his head: No. No way. Everyone’s happy, it’s copacetic. Stable. Everyone’s building, everyone’s making money. I mean not working people. Legitimate working people in this country are fucked. Am I right? But all the big guys are making money.

  I hear ya.

  Of course I do. Crime has one-percenters too. And a pretty ferocious middle management stratum, which is another reason to outsource. Who has time to be taking finger joints in the name of HR? I mean what even is that? Fuck should I do with a finger joint? Necklaces?

  The way I do things is about money. Like Billy is doing things now because I told him to. Used to be th
at his office—the only place I ever meet him, because I do not deliver cocaine to his office it goes direct to the sites—was in one of the shittier parts of town. Now the area has moved up a little and it’s edgy and artsy and his brick-and-whitewash interior is a little bit authentic. He was going to sell it, cash in, I said no for god’s sake stay in, rent out space. Consult. So now he consults on design, which is to say people come to his office and get inspired and go away and duplicate it really expensively using suppliers he specifies and he gets a cut for doing nothing. Additional revenue streams again. He even owns the salon where his guys get their manscaping done which is double economy because he knows all that cocaine-addled hair gets properly disposed of and not scraped into a fucking evidence bag by a drug squad asshole looking to make his numbers.

  I thought about buying that place myself but I don’t want the connect. I don’t want Billy’s guys in my place singing last night’s hot dance track and breathing stripper fluids and dropping wraps of the cocaine that I sell them through a variety of really clever cutouts on the floor of a business that does not need to be linked to that sort of thing. I don’t want the hassle of disposing of evidence in the form of butt-hair scrapings. It’s a bad idea. You don’t close the circuit. So I told Billy to do it and if it worked out he should pay me in information and it did and he does. He is absolutely straight with me because there are no areas of conflict in our holdings or lines of business and that is to our mutual advantage and we both know it.

  I assume that one day he will fuck me on something and then we may experience a little turbulence. But everyone knows I’m not a violent guy so there’s really no need to worry about that. I’ll take it out in trade. Whatever. Everything goes better without friction.

  I said that to Billy once and now it’s written on the inside of the salon’s glass window: #withoutfriction.

  Sometimes I feel old and tired.

  Hashtag.

  Billy says: So I mean no man, no problems. No one moving, just like nothing. It’s all good Jack. Why do you ask?

  Because there’s a crazy old bitch in my building shot in the head and she’s just a crazy old bitch.

  Someone’s inheritance maybe?

  Yeah, maybe.

  Thing is Jack people get crazy waiting for old folks to die. When you’re young you think shit: grandpa can’t hang on long past seventy and even if he does I have all the time in the world. Then grandpa hits seventy and you’re already thirty and he don’t die and then he hits ninety and you’re fucking fifty. Are you kidding me? So suddenly it’s all about hey, grandpa, let’s go snorkelling! Let’s experiment with drugs, grandpa, what’ve you got to lose?

  Fuck, Billy.

  I’m saying.

  Fuck, people do that?

  Do what, Jack?

  They try to get their grandparents to take drugs so that they’ll die?

  Heart failure? Sure Jack all the—yeah maybe not like all of—but yeah they absolutely do yeah.

  There is a fucking thing I did not think of. This is why my relationship with Billy is profitable. He’s like the perfect shithead. He attracts the complex and simple thoughts of all shitheads and he explains them to me. So now I’m making a note: I need an age ceiling on my sales, or possibly some sort of health check. That would actually work. The way Billy has his salon, I could have some kind of spa or fitness thing, hire some trainers, some medics. Yet another layer keeping me away from the bad, making me look legit. Who knows? Might take off so hard I could just shed the coke thing, back burner it until it’s legal. Although you want to stay ahead of the curve on something like that, the technology, the consumer. Probably best to hang in there. Plus also I like coke not like to take but I like the product because it is elegant. It does exactly what it says on the billboard. Coke fucks you up.

  Back to Didi.

  Someone does pay Didi’s rent, for sure. Did pay it. Can’t possibly just be that person economising, not with a hit. Hidden costs everywhere in that kind of decision and it is all totally downside risk so why? Is someone maybe sending a message to someone else and it just happens I’m near the phone?

  Billy says he wants me to come and see his brother Rex, who is in demolition, blow up a building. Someplace called the Triangle—yes there are three buildings arranged in a triangle because downtown civic architecture is nothing if not disappointingly predictable—and they will destroy the tallest of them and it will go straight down into the ground. Rex recommends that everyone come and bring a date because apparently the sight of this happening is almost certain to lead to coitus. Do not ask me why I do not want to think about it.

  Rex is almost exactly like Billy except he destroys and Billy creates so he is like yin to Billy’s yang except obviously do not ever ask Billy about his yang. Rex and company are if anything even more fucked on the Pale Peruvian Stallion than Billy’s crew and that should fucking terrify everyone in the free world.

  I say: Thank you Billy I will put that in my planner.

  Billy says that’s cool and then I say goodbye and get on the crosstown train and think about the things that I have learned.

  Snorkelling. For fuck’s sake.

  CROSSTOWN RAIL. Getting so it’s the oldest thing in the city, and it’s not even that old. They say you’re a local when you miss how this place used to be. Basically everyone these days. Mind you they say that about New York too and look how that goes.

  Time sickness. Future shock. Information overload. All the bullshit ways we tell ourselves the world’s getting faster. It’s not. We’re just older. Seen too much, just want to sit down and have a cup of coffee.

  The crosstown is like death without all the drama. Just peace and quiet and everyone is grey. Briefcases and umbrellas and long coats. All kinds of people because this is that kind of city. White, black and brown people, Germans and Angolans and Brazilians, Native Americans and Dutch and Manchurians and Okinawans. World in a basket, all of them grey in the sleet.

  Back where I came from—where the city is a kind of curseword or a bedtime story to scare your kids with—we farmed. Probably what sent me into coffee and then into cocaine. I know crop. Always have. Still keep my mother’s place, got some livestock. Pigs in wallows. My thing now, notionally: organic goods and artisanal produce. Biologically fermented soft drinks and herbal remedies. Smoked bacon. Anything I feel like.

  See how that works? I can buy and own chemical gear. I can travel and sell. I can carry powder samples. You want to guess if I ever carry cocaine in a pot of mustard? OF COURSE I DON’T! Ten points. Now you’re getting it. I do all the things you should do if you deal cocaine, but that’s not how I deal cocaine. It’s completely clean and separate. I have letters from border authorities, from ministers, explaining to local law that I’m a legitimate trader in high-end edibles, that it’s my endless and slightly amusing chore to move things that look as if they could contain drugs across borders. Everyone knows that I look like a coke importer because I’m not one, and all the time I am. If I ever get caught they’ll be like: Of course! Fuck, I should have seen that. Like a good crime movie. Should have seen it. And then they’ll realise their careers are at an end because: judgement. They’ve got none, and they put themselves on the line for me, recommended me, explained me. They’re done.

  Or of course they could make my little problem go away. I could be very financially remunerative in the right circumstances. Or not.

  I’m on the crosstown. I like the crosstown.

  GREY CROSSTOWN PEOPLE and rain outside and sitting all placid on the bockadabonk bockadabonk railway that being the noise railways make and reading this woman’s paper that’s sitting opposite and I am content like relaxed and in my happy place and then seriously it is just that day:

  WWWWWUUUUUURAGH

  Whut—

  GONNA FUCKIN KILL YOU

  Oh for fuck’s sake—

  GONNA KIL
L YOU MAAAN

  My god it never rains et cetera.

  This guy, with a—what is that? Is that even a real gun? Fuck. This is going to go so wrong. What’s happening here? Not like, in this compartment. I know what’s happening in this compartment. I’m asking: what’s happening to my life now? You know how statistically unlikely this is? Didi gets executed under me and a dog gets shished and now this guy this asshole with his enormagun and his GONNA KIIIIILLLL YYYEEEWWW.

  Who says that? Who has a gun the size of a—I mean if he fires that thing at someone—well fuck if that scaffolding pole had hit a baby horse then maybe that would make the same kind of—

  Yeah fuck off it’s a tube I know. You really going to do this with me now?

  KILL YOU ALL NOW. SHOOT YOU INNA FUCKING HEAD RIGHT NOW.

  Who talks like that? Is he even listening to himself?

  Gold-plated Libyan dictator gun. Miami club owner gun. Fucking James Bond badguy gun. All the stereotypes. Big. Fucking. Gun. Is what I’m saying.

  In my crosstown. In my fucking crosstown. There are many others like it but this one is mine. What even is that about? Is he asking for money?

  I say: Hey! Is this about money? You want money?

  My fellow passengers are not happy. Assholes. Do they think he’s just gonna go away? Ignore him darling it’s just an unwashed fuckhead with a hand cannon. Pay no mind.

  Seriously what? Who thinks that? You want to live your way through this? There are protocols. There are fucking procedures, man. There are ways and means.

  First you got to make contact. Gotta get so he thinks of you as a person not a face in the crowd.

  My name’s Jack. What’s yours?

  Nothing. Just gooooogly eyes like gooooogly. Man’s not on a crosstown he’s on a ghost train. Seeing ghosts. What’s he seeing? Evil alien lizards maybe. Could go wrong.

  I say: Now you say Hey Jack I want all your money. All right? And I go in here and I get all my money and give it to you. And this guy here does the same and so on. Is that what you want?