To Hell in a Handcart

Eight

Ilie Popescu knew the men from Moscow would come looking for him. His father, Marin, had set him up in the car-smuggling business and sent him to Hamburg, where he stole Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and Porsches to order and shipped them to the former Soviet Union. The hard cash he sent back to the Tigani helped finance his father’s other line of business, an organized begging racket across Western Europe.

At twenty-one, Ilie was an accomplished car thief. It was easy money. In the first six months, Ilie successfully stole and despatched cars worth almost $3 million on the black market. The deal was always cash on delivery.

On a roll, emboldened by an unblemished track record, Ilie met his Russian contact and explained that in future he would need half the money up front. He had overheads, he explained. There were police officers and port security guards to be paid off.

The message was relayed to the men in Moscow, who were unhappy about the new terms and conditions. But they trusted Marin Popescu, with whom they had done business for several years since the fall of Communism. They would extend that trust to his son.

A week later, Ilie received $500,000 in advance of his next consignment, in unmarked, used notes in a leather attaché case, passed to him by his contact in a bar off the Reeperbahn. In return he was handed a list containing the marque and specification of the vehicles he was to supply, some of them destined for clients in the Middle East.

The deliveries were to be completed within one month. Ilie would receive the balance when the cars arrived in Moscow.

That gave him plenty of time to party. He was a good-looking boy, lean, about 5ft 9ins, with short, jet-black hair, chocolate-brown eyes and a winning, slightly menacing, smile. In Hamburg, he had developed a taste for expensive clothes, nightclubbing, whores, cocaine and gambling.

Cocaine and gambling don’t mix. There’s calculated risk and then there’s recklessness. Ilie came down on the recklessness side of the equation. In one week in the casinos, Ilie blew the thick end of $350,000 on the tables, $350,000 the Russians had given him as a down payment.

So what? Ilie told himself. It doesn’t concern them. They’ll get their cars and I’ll get the balance.

The cocaine convinced Ilie he was invincible. It also made him sloppy.

His modus operandi had always been to target vehicles belonging to Hamburg’s high-rollers and wealthy industrialists, importers and exporters. He stole them individually from parking lots and garages, paying off chauffeurs and car park attendants for information and silence.

Single car thefts attracted little attention from the authorities. The owners were irritated, but insured for full replacement value. Why should they worry?

Within a fortnight, Ilie had frittered the whole $500,000. He hadn’t stolen a single car for over two weeks, his Russian contact was becoming concerned. Don’t panic, Ilie reassured him. Have I ever let you down?

That night, his tame policeman, Jurgen Freund, called at his hotel for his regular $10,000 monthly retainer. He found Ilie in bed with two whores. The room was littered with empty bottles – champagne, Polish vodka, scotch. The whores were sharing a substantial joint. Ilie’s eyes were on stalks and his nose was streaming.

‘I’ve come for my wages,’ the cop said.

‘You’ll have to wait. I don’t have the money right now,’ Ilie replied.

‘Not good enough,’ Freund said.

‘Hey, relax, man. Have a drink. Have a smoke. Hey, baby,’ he said to one of the prostitutes. ‘Be nice to the man.’

‘I didn’t come here to get laid. I came to get paid,’ Freund said angrily. ‘Two weeks ago, you received $500,000 from the Russians. Do you think I’m stupid? All I want is $10,000. You owe me.’

‘I said you’ll get it.’

‘You’re running out of time. You’ll never make your delivery. You haven’t stolen one car in the last two weeks.’

‘I’ll be fine. I’ve got it covered.’

‘Don’t get careless,’ Freund warned.

‘I’ve got it all worked out. There’s a car transporter coming in from Wolfsburg on Friday. Problem solved.’

‘That’s not the way it works.’

‘It does now. Why steal cars one at a time when there’s a dozen for the taking? It makes no sense.’

‘Only if you’ve done the amount of coke you have, Popescu. You must be mad. You’ll attract attention to yourself. We might be able to overlook the odd Mercedes here, the occasional BMW going missing there. But a transporter-load? No fucking chance.’

‘Who’s running this operation?’ Ilie barked.

‘You’re on your own this time, my Roma friend.’

‘Fuck you,’ screamed Ilie, pulling a pistol and pointing it at Freund’s face. The cop backed away from the gun and opened the door to leave.

‘Fuck you, I don’t need you. You’re off the payroll. Now get out.’

Two days later, a car transporter pulled off the autobahn near Hamburg and onto a slip road. It drew to a halt at a set of temporary traffic lights.

Ilie Popescu and another Romanian, Gica Dinantu, also from the Tigani, scrambled up an embankment, scaled the side of the cab and ordered the driver at gunpoint to get out and surrender the keys.

The driver offered no resistance. He climbed calmly from the transporter and walked away with a measured step. Ilie took over in the driver’s seat, Gica rode shotgun.

As Ilie engaged the gears and eased the transporter forward, the driver started to run. He threw himself over the embankment and rolled downhill.

Ilie laughed. This was a piece of piss. He pressed the accelerator and drove the giant transporter straight through the traffic lights, which he had put there fifteen minutes earlier.

Ilie Popescu had just stepped up a division and out of his league.

As the transporter rounded the first bend, Ilie was confronted with the flashing blue lights of a police roadblock. Cars and personnel carriers filled the road ahead. Armed officers crouched behind them.

Freund, the double-crossing bastard.

Fuelled by cocaine, Ilie hit the gas and charged the roadblock. A volley of shots pierced the windscreen. Ilie ducked instinctively as the first salvo somehow missed his head.

Freund had no intention of taking them alive.

‘Gica, fire back man, FIRE BACK,’ he screamed. His words landed on dead ears.

In the passenger seat to Ilie’s right, Gica Dinantu was slumped forward. The top of his head had been shot off. Blood and brains oozed out of his skull.

Ilie ploughed through the roadblock, scattering police cars like Dinky toys. Bullets bounced off the side of the transporter and ricocheted around the cabin. Miraculously, Ilie was unscathed.

The massive bulk of the transporter was being propelled with unstoppable momentum. Despite the power steering, Ilie struggled to maintain control. The tail of the heavily laden articulated vehicle swayed violently from side to side, like an agitated alligator.

Ilie clung on as he kept his foot flat on the floor, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Hamburg police department armed response unit.

In the passenger side rear-view mirror, Ilie spotted a police motorcycle gaining on him. The pillion passenger had a high-velocity rifle trained on the transporter. The cop fired twice, puncturing the front nearside tyre, which exploded and shed its rubber tread like orange peel.

Ilie hit the brakes. As he did so, the police motorcycle skidded, hit a pothole and began to cartwheel. The two officers were killed on impact as the bike sliced through the back window of a brand-new Mercedes E320 estate car, upon which an antiques dealer from Hamburg had already paid a substantial deposit.

They were ejected onto the tarmac when the transporter lurched to the right and turned turtle at 110 kmph. It skidded off the road and travelled a couple of hundred meters on its roof, crushing its top floor cargo like cigarette cartons, before spinning again and crunching to a halt, driver’s side up.

Ilie had retained consciousness throughout, courtesy of the copious quantity of cocaine he had consumed before setting out on his first big-time lorry hijacking.

He tried to push open the driver’s door, but the force of gravity conspired against him. He attempted to lower the window, but the electrics were dead. With his right foot, he kicked out what remained of the windscreen, unfastened his seat belt, swung from the door handle and jumped.

He landed safely and rolled, parachute-style, away from the transporter. He looked up and saw in front of him an M320 sport utility vehicle which had slipped from its berth of the lower deck of the transporter, been thrown clear and landed on all four wheels, remarkably unscathed.

Ilie yanked open the door, dived under the steering column and twisted the ignition wires together. The old hotwire routine. The engine sparked into life.

The tank contained enough gas to put maybe ten kilometres between Ilie and his pursuers, if he was lucky. The motorcycle cops were the advance guard. The rest of the posse was still some way off.

Ilie pushed the gear lever into Low and engaged the four-wheel drive. He guided the M320 about fifty metres away from the scene of the crash and turned towards the transporter, which lay motionless on its side, displaying its seventeen remaining tyres and soft underbelly.

Ilie lowered the electric driver’s side window, pulled the pistol from his belt and pumped six shots into the fuel tank. As the first flames shot into the air, Ilie gunned the M320 in the opposite direction.

He was about 250 metres away when he heard the explosion. The reflection in the rear-view mirror turned bright orange. The heat from the fireball engulfed the M320 but it outran the flames. Ilie didn’t look back. He knew the inferno would keep the chasing policemen at bay.

With any luck they would think he had perished along with his childhood friend, Gica Dinantu, and one million dollars’ worth of Daimler-Benz automobiles.

But that wasn’t all that went up in flames.

So did Ilie Popescu’s chance of recovering the $500,000 he owed the Russians.

Marin Popescu had listened in silence as Ilie related his predicament. He could not believe his son’s foolishness.

After abandoning and torching the M320 on the outskirts of Hamburg, Ilie had found his way back to the Tigani via the extensive network Marin used to infiltrate his gangs of professional beggars throughout Western Europe. The German police would eventually piece together what had happened and the men from Moscow wouldn’t be far behind.

Marin knew they would come. There would be retribution. And first he had to break the news of the death of their only son, Gica, to his old friends, the Dinantus. They would blame Ilie, two years Gica’s senior.

Marin was furious but he had to protect his son. Fortunately for Ilie, Marin didn’t only smuggle cars, he smuggled people.

Ilie joined a party of Roma bound for England. Marin gave him $5,000 and told him to lose himself as soon as he got to London. He was not under any circumstances to contact his elder brother, Boban, who ran the London end of the car theft racket. They would be watching Boban, Marin warned. Nor must he attempt to phone home. Ilie would have to vanish until Marin could square things with the Russians. Marin would get word to his son when it was time.

Ilie and the other Roma, men, women, children and babes in arms, who had paid $3,000 each for their passage to England, left Romania at the town of Timisoara, on the Hungarian border. They were hidden in false ceilings in lorries and driven across Europe to Calais. Once there they were transferred to fresh vehicles and loaded on cross-Channel ferries, unhindered by the French authorities.

Ilie and the others had their instructions. Once at sea, they were to destroy all the passports and documents, anything which might identify them. Britain had a reputation throughout Eastern Europe as a soft touch, for interpreting the 1951 Human Rights Convention on Refugees more liberally than any other country. Asylum-seekers from Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia and Romania poured daily across the Channel.

Ilie and his party had been abandoned at a motorway service area near Ashford in Kent. The women had immediately started begging outside a fast-food outlet. The men banged on car windows at petrol pumps, demanding money. The children descended on the convenience store and stole everything they could carry.

When the outnumbered private security staff called the police, a single squad car arrived. The officers handed out leaflets in thirty-two different languages, many of them scribble, instructing the new arrivals to make their way to the immigration service reception centre at Croydon, in Surrey. Transport would be provided.

Ilie’s instinct was to slip away. But where to? He couldn’t get in touch with Boban. He needed a new identity. He boarded the luxury coach laid on by the local authority and travelled with the rest of the party to Croydon.

If he bucked the system, he reckoned, he might still be arrested and deported.

At Croydon, as a further precaution, he told the inquiring immigration officer through a resident translator that he was sixteen. His father had told him they could not deport him if he was a minor. Ilie could just about pass for sixteen from a distance. The immigration officer looked at him and shrugged. He was past caring. He was on a promise and just wanted to get home for the night.

Under ‘age’, he wrote ‘sixteen’.

Under ‘name’, he wrote down the first name that had come into Ilie’s head. The name of the man Ilie left dead by the roadside in Hamburg.

‘Gica Dinantu.’

Nine

‘And in a late-breaking story, before the Deputy Prime Min ister flew off to Acapulco he decreed that as part of the government’s integrated transport policy the whole of central London, Birmingham and Manchester were to be pedestrianized. He also confirmed that proposals to put humps and other traffic-calming measures on motorways were being studied at the highest level in line with global warming and road safety targets. That’s all for this bulletin. Next news in an hour. You’re listening to Rocktalk 99FM, your first choice for classic rock and conversation. Here’s Jimi Hendrix with some of that old “Crosstown Traffic”.’

Mickey hit the OFF button. He’d had enough cross-town traffic for one day. Enough cross-country traffic, too. Enough motorway traffic. Enough traffic to last him the rest of his life. Full stop. But they’d made it. Four and a half hours after leaving Andi’s mum’s house in Palmers Green, and several light years after leaving home, the French family finally arrived at Goblin’s.

As they drew up to the entrance, Mickey couldn’t help noticing that the ‘l’ and ‘s’ were missing. The gap-toothed neon sign above the door consequently read ‘GOB IN’. It made it sound like a punk rock revival.

The car eased to a halt. Mickey put on the handbrake. No one else stirred. Terry had eventually come down to earth on the south side of the Dartford River Crossing and had collapsed into a deep sleep.

Sheer exhaustion had caught up with Andi and Katie, too. They had both slept most of the way and Mickey had to content himself with Rocktalk 99FM for company.

He only really listened to the station because Ricky Sharpe worked for it. He thought the other DJs were brainless chimps, who belonged on children’s television. He liked the music, though, so he stuck with it.

‘Andi, wake up love,’ he said, gently shaking his wife’s right shoulder. ‘We’re here.’

The kids were unconscious. ‘Come on kids. Terry, son. Kate, love. Wake up, bambinos. The eagle has landed.’

Mickey eased himself out of the car with a modicum of difficulty and lit a Marlboro. He could feel his back. Although the doctors at Stoke Mandeville had made a fine job of rebuilding his shattered discs, his back was prone to seize up on long journeys. He had experimented with one of those seat covers made out of wooden balls, which some cabbies and bus drivers swear by. But he’d thrown it away. It had been like sitting on marbles and played havoc with his Chalfonts.

‘Your back OK, Mickey?’ Andi asked, with a trace of anxiety. She still feared it might snap without notice.

‘A bit stiff. I need to straighten up.’ Mickey stretched, rocked on the balls of his feet, supported his weight on the driver’s door and attempted a couple of squat thrusts, which brought on a violent bout of coughing.

‘I think you’re supposed to take the cigarette out of your mouth first,’ Andi joked.

Mickey smiled back. ‘A Radox bath should do the trick.’

‘I’ll give you a nice massage, if you play your cards right.’ She blew him a kiss.

‘Carry on like that and it won’t only be my back that’s stiff.’

‘Dad! Mu-um!’ said Katie. ‘Don’t be so-oo gross.’

Mickey and Andi reddened. They’d thought the kids were still asleep.

‘Only joking,’ Mickey said. ‘You know we’re far too old for that sort of thing.’

‘Old enough to know better, too,’ Katie played along. Secretly she was thrilled that her mum and dad still fancied each other. It’s just that she didn’t want them flirting in front of her. And they didn’t usually. Although they had always been open with the kids, privacy was important, too.

Whenever they went away, even though it hoisted the bill, they always got the kids separate rooms of their own, ever since Katie had reached the self-conscious stage. They’d booked three rooms adjoining at Goblin’s.

Mickey walked round to the back of the car and opened the rear tailgate. Cousin Roy had done a good job.

As he reached inside to begin unloading their luggage, Mickey heard a shout.

‘Oi, you.’

Mickey looked up and saw a belligerent elf, about 5ft 11ins, in a Lincoln-green jerkin, green tights, curly boots and red felt hat, marching towards him, gesticulating like a deranged tic-tac man. He wore a green and white badge the size of a side plate, bearing the words: ‘Goblin’s Greeter. Here To Help You Have Fun.’

‘Oi, you. Yes, you. I’m talking to you. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the elf barked.

‘Excuse me. And who are you, exactly?’ Mickey replied.

‘Security.’

‘You’re kidding me. You don’t look like security. You look like something that just fell off a toadstool.’

‘Company policy. All employees dress like elves. Disney’s got Mickey Mouse and Goofy. Goblin’s has got elves.’

Whatever the outfit was supposed to achieve, the effect was spoiled by the clumsy tattoos on his forearms.

Mickey couldn’t resist a loud guffaw. He thought about chinning him but decided against it. He was too tired for a start. Anyway, think of the court case. GBH on an elf. He’d never live it down. Easier to take the piss.

Mickey engaged the elf in eye contact, then slowly surveyed him, up and down, from the bell on his hat to the curly points of his pixie boots.