You Will Never Find Me by Robert Wilson Page A

him, thinking: is this going to work? He could do violence, could Darren. He was bloody enormous. And he could do numbers if it was to spend money on himself or his girlfriend, but business, logistics, man management, meeting the foreign suppliers? He should have sent him to college . . . then again, he’d got chucked out of school for half-killing some kid in the playground.
    The intercom phone buzzed.
    â€˜I’ll take it,’ said Dennis, who knew some Spanish.
    He ran a hand over his head, which like his son’s was shaved, but in his case to disguise his baldness. It took him a couple of goes to get to his feet and answer the phone.
    â€˜
Buenos dias
,’ he said and listened without understanding everything that was said back to him, but let them in from the street anyway and managed to add, ‘
No hay ascensor.
’
    He waited with the door open, heard them pounding up the marble-clad stairs. El Osito arrived first, not even out of breath. The two Mexican brothers arrived panting. Dennis started up in his crap Spanish. El Osito stopped him with his hand.
    â€˜It’s O.K., we can do this in English,’ he said. ‘I am Carlos. You know Jaime and Jesús.’
    Dennis introduced himself and his son. They shook hands. Dennis offered coffee, which was accepted. They sat around the small table in the living room while Darren made the coffees with capsules in a machine.
    â€˜This a nice place,’ said El Osito, looking around at the rented duplex apartment. ‘Better than a hotel.’
    â€˜We prefer it,’ said Dennis. ‘Less public, know what I mean?’
    The coffees arrived in what looked like doll’s house cups in Darren’s massive hands. El Osito disdained sugar and sipped his coffee with one hand resting on his vast thigh, the muscles of his forearm standing out thick as hawsers. The two Mexican brothers emptied two sachets of sugar each into their coffees, which they stirred meditatively. Jaime was early forties, heavily built with thick, black, unmovable hair, very dark eyebrows, a moustache and a permanent shadow on his cheeks. Jesús was thirty, more slightly built, and wore his hair long but tied back into a ponytail to show his smooth, unblemished, good-looking features.
    â€˜Vicente says we going to continue to send you two hundred kilos a month,’ said El Osito. ‘He also want you to know that he sees the UK as a growth market, especially London. They want to start moving much more product this year.’
    â€˜Like how much?’
    â€˜Five hundred kilos a month by the end of the year.’
    â€˜That’s a big jump,’ said Dennis.
    â€˜You know, with the crisis here in Spain they don’t have the money to spend on blow. The market going down. We need to expand in other places. Everybody going to London. A lot of money going out of the euro and into the pound. Twenty billion euros a month leaving Spain. Most of it to London. That’s where the market is. Italians, Greeks all putting their money over there and let’s not talk about the Russians. You sitting on a big market expansion if you want. If you don’t want . . . ?’
    El Osito opened his hands as if Dennis was giving it all away. ‘I want,’ said Dennis, conscious of imitating El Osito’s speech patterns. ‘It’s just that I’ve got to expand my end of things. It takes time to develop a dealer network. A safe one, properly vetted so you don’t get infiltrators.’
    Dennis could see he was losing him.
    â€˜This the problem here in Spain,’ said El Osito. ‘The
costas
are dead. Property going down. The buildings empty. The
puti
clubs are closing. The local government is cutting everything. No money in the economy and Spain gone from being the biggest consumer to almost nothing. We suffering, Dennis. So we looking to the outside. We move our operations away from the
costas
now. We just