Saturday, January 23, 2016

PEPAC novel: excerpt: "The Inciting Action"

The only thing more dangerous than a trained killer, his father had once said, is a trained liar. 
Richard therefore eyes the lawyer at his doorstep with suspicion.
Not only because, having received a prestigious legal education, Señor Francesco Hernandez is schooled in a certain controlled boisterousness with the truth; but, thanks to an early career in a Mexican drugs cartel of no less prestige, Francesco can also demonstrate a certain controlled boisterousness with a wide variety of personal weaponry — edged, rifled and otherwise. 
Francesco really is both a trained liar and a trained killer. 
Which, for most people, makes him quite a dangerous handful when he turns up unexpectedly at four o’clock in the morning — in military terms, almost exactly the perfect time for a pre-dawn strike on the enemy. 
But Francesco is not military.  Richard is not the enemy.  Richard knows Francesco the Lawyer-cum-Killer from childhood.  Francesco is his father’s right-hand man.  Inscrutable, intelligent and infuriatingly informed about everything, Francesco is the only person Richard has learnt to truly rely on.  Whilst, automatically, being ever-so-slightly wary of.
Right now Richard is too tired to be too wary as he stands in the doorway of his mews flat.  He wears boat shoes, a florid silk dressing gown and a puzzled expression — an unfortunate combination which makes him look like an eccentric aristocrat.  Richard does not consider himself to be an eccentric.  He considers it eccentric to read the Telegraph online, highly peculiar that people would choose to live in the Provinces, and quite beyond the pale to go to bed without pyjamas. 
What is for certain is that Richard doesn’t have the look of a man who sees a lot of early mornings.  He has that indefinable pampered look of someone who doesn’t know the meaning of rush hour or cashflow crisis.  Despite this, a resolute jaw saves him from looking puppyish; indeed, with an idea in his head and a couple of Clicquots in his belly, Richard has been known to radiate a certain dogged gravitas; then he becomes more solemn than usual and his forehead gleams and draw attention to the extent that his untidy, straw-like hair has begun to recede.
What we have here — the trained eye would conclude — is not your Alpha Male.  What we have here instead is a bumptious, bovine Beta, a scatty Young Fogey with a pudding’s chance in Hell of achieving anything useful. 
But those that really know Richard know better.  Pushover he ain’t.  Should he suddenly decide it is The Right Thing To Do, Mr Richard Espinosa-Smith will emerge, like a plucky gunboat, from a fog of dissolute whiffle and stolidly devastate any obstacle or opposition in his (often frighteningly unimaginative) path.
Richard will, it has been noted, fuck people up old-fashioned-style if he has to.
But he’s no Alpha Male.
What confronts Richard on his doorstep certainly is an Alpha Male.  Francesco — the cultured ex-sicario of Los Aguilás de Sangre, of Chihuahua province — is, as ever, attended by a cloud of fierce, distinguished aftershave that marks his territory like a sophisticated lion.  But what does he want?  And why does he think now is a good time to ask for it?  Military strike, social call, or the usual whimsical summons from his father — as far as Richard is concerned, whatever the most educated assassin in Mexico is playing at in Mayfair, it’s a bloody stupid time to turn up on somebody’s doorstep expecting a sympathetic hearing.  
Francesco doesn’t look like he is doing sympathy today.  His expression is very grave indeed.  So grave that Richard is about to joke sourly, “has somebody –“
“Your father,” Francesco says, “is dying.  You must come now.  Adelante.”

Richard does not panic.  He knows that people die.  Even in Mayfair.

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