“I think you do. I think you met him in London. I think you left a list for him in the left luggage at St Pancras station. I think he paid you, quite a reasonable sum. And I don’t think you cared what he was going to do with the information you gave him. I think you were pleased when he talked about publishing a book. I think you liked the idea of getting all those wealthy foreigners to go back to where they came from.”
“No. You don’t understand.”
Alaman swallowed visibly, and I realised he was sweating. He looked over his shoulder as though he expected the doors to burst open at any minute and I wondered whether he thought I was part of some kind of internal investigation, or whether he thought his bosses would let the Russians in here to do their worst.
Maybe they would, if they knew he’d compromised their client list, gone against his banker’s vows.
“Please. You have the wrong person.”
“No, I don’t. We’ve been very thorough.”
His hands were shaking now. “Who are you?”
A smile curled onto my face. “We’re the Bratva, Mr Alaman. And it was the last mistake you’ll ever make crossing us. You’re a worm. I came here to see if I could make you a deal, to secure this situation. Make sure there are never any more leaks, but I see now what a relic you are. What an opportunistic creep. Look at you, with your Patek Philip watch. You don’t even have a moral reason for doing this. You just wanted an easy pay day.”
He shook his head. “No. No you’re wrong. Please.”
“Am I? I don’t think so. You’re useless to us, halfway out the door with all your focus on your retirement plan. You’re not who we need at all.”
He sat down in the seat that was supposed to be for me, so heavily that it looked like his legs had given out from under him. “Please. I could -”
“You could, what? We don’t need you. You’re a snake and a liability.”
“I could make sure this never happens again.”
“How are you going to do that? We can’t trust you.”
“I could move the accounts over. To another associate. Someone you vetted.”
“Someone who’d be more loyal than you?”
“Yes. Exactly. Just, please don’t do anything to me. Don’t tell the standards authorities.”
“You’re in no position to ask favors, Mr Alaman. You send us names before you think about doing another thing with our accounts and then we will make our decision. If you so much as breathe without our say so, there will be trouble. You go to the police, you’ll be lucky if you see next week, and I can guarantee you will never work in banking again.”
He nodded, meek, humble, almost penitent. For a moment the way Roman had talked about bankers being like priests made sense to me. Money was this man’s god and the bank was his temple. Being cast out would be a fate worse than death and it was just as much of a threat.
I was on a high when I walked back out of the bank and onto the street. Maxim was right there waiting for me and he met my smile with his, falling into step as we walked away.
“How did it go?”
I shrugged. “Well enough. We can’t use him, long term, but he’s sorting out an alternative situation.”
“What’s to stop him from causing more problems?”
“He’s terrified of his career going down the pan. And he really doesn’t want to get hurt.”
Max looked back over his shoulder towards the bank. “It would have been easier to take him out. We still don’t know what he’s going to do next.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sooner or later all these bodies are going to start catching up to you, you know.”
He shook his head. “No one ever finds-”
“A Toropov corpse. I know, I know. But he’s more useful finding us a banker we can work with exclusively, who’d properly be on our payroll, wouldn’t he?”
Maxim grumbled, but I knew he was coming around to what I was saying. “You’re turning me into an enforcer, you know that?”
“Would it be so bad?”
Maxim looked at me, and at the sun soaked street we were walking down and let out a slow breath. “I suppose this beats staking him out in a disused building for weeks at a time.”
I let my shoulders rise in a shrug, as though I hadn’t already thought it. “We get to enjoy the city. Don’t have to hide our faces quite as much.”
“We do. That’s true. And I would like to show you a good time. You deserve better than spending half your life in the shadows.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Did you bring that dress? That silky one that clings all the way down?”
I grinned. There was a distinct kind of heat seeping into Maxim’s eyes and his voice sounded husky just thinking about it.