McCracken shrugged. ‘We might have to make deals, Bill.’
‘Surrender?’ Benny B said, sounding shocked.
‘Not that exactly,’ McCracken replied. ‘Just talk to them, so we can buy them off for a while … give ourselves more time to plan.’
‘Bollocks!’ Nick Merryweather blurted. ‘We’re not losing so much ground that we’re being forced into that, surely?’
Merryweather was the Crew’s whoremaster-in-chief, and a depraved, violent pimp. But for all that he was good at brutality, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box.
‘Even if we were confronting them,’ McCracken replied, ‘which we’re not because we never know where they are, all we’d really be doing is fighting fires. Like you say, Bill, they’re scouting rather than invading.’
A silence followed, as the rest of them ingested this.
‘Well, Frank,’ Pentecost finally said, ‘the latest batch of accounts appear to support your POV inasmuch as we certainly need to rebuild our powerbase.’ He wafted a fistful of print-outs before slamming them down on the table. Even those seated farthest away could recognise the columns of financial data.
‘And as you gentlemen no doubt can tell from my demeanour,’ Pentecost said, ‘they don’t make for happy reading.’ He snatched a sheet up and turned to Jon Killarny, the Irishman who ran their counterfeiting scams. ‘August this year – down three per cent on July. July down two per cent on June. June down one per cent on May.’
‘Now, Bill … I …’ Killarny, a one-time IRA sergeant-at-arms, struggled to explain himself, only for Pentecost to switch his attention to Al Reed, whose role was the ‘protection’ of pubs, bars and nightclubs.
‘August this year …’ The Chairman shook his head. ‘Down six per cent on July. Six per cent, gentlemen. July down three per cent on June … and then this, June down eight per cent – yes, I kid you not – on May. None of you need to look smug, by the way.’ There was now a snap in his voice, his frosty eyes roving the room. ‘It’s the same across the board. When we reach November, we’ll have a better picture of our earnings for this last financial year, but even the boldest estimate puts them down an average four per cent on last year, which was four per cent down on the year before …’
And so it went, the Chairman listing and describing each and every one of their underperformances. In the end, only Frank McCracken’s department’s monthly returns were more or less in alignment, August showing a reduction on the previous month of less than half a per cent, though even that, to Bill Pentecost, was less than tolerable.
‘Of course,’ he said, resuming a calmer tone, ‘these are our net earnings, are they not? They’re not gross.’
There were visible stirrings of discomfort. Suddenly, they all knew what he was driving at, and it was exactly what Frank McCracken had feared.
The Crew was born of bloodshed. Back in those distant days of the twentieth century, numerous criminal firms had dotted the post-industrial wilderness that was Northwest England, each with its own territory, each with its own speciality, though they’d shared many overlapping interests, which for decades meant they’d existed in a state of semi-permanent warfare, ensuring that no one was earning to their full potential. The Crew had been the remedy, Wild Bill Pentecost, whose stronghold at the time was in East and South Manchester, and whose field was loan-sharking and general racketeering, eventually luring the bosses of his rival firms into a new kind of unity which promised peace and prosperity for all. Many of those original men still sat in the room, equal partners in the overarching enterprise that was the Crew, deferring only to their acknowledged Chairman, their various departments still reflecting the particular expertise they’d each brought to the table.
But all along Pentecost had known that he couldn’t expect this rapacious band to work solely for him, each week feeding the entirety of their ill-gotten gains into central funds via an elaborate money-laundering operation, from which they would all be paid an equal monthly share. That would have been totally unacceptable because it would have been unfair. Toni Zambala, for example, outsold all the others, while at the other end of the scale Benny B added nothing to company cashflow, a discrepancy exacerbated by the fact that his role as Head of Security was largely nominal these days, most of the underbosses preferring to resolve security issues themselves. McCracken alone had at least as many bent coppers, solicitors, local government officials and journalists on his payroll as Benny did, while Lennie and Toni held both the region’s major cities in thrall to their innumerable dealers, street gangs and general-purpose thugs. Benny B couldn’t be underestimated, of course. Having spent much of his time recruiting mercenaries and other ex-military personnel, he could put a considerable force of well-trained killers into the field – but still, he didn’t produce anything. Appreciating the dangers of this imbalance, Pentecost had authorised at an early stage what he called ‘the skim’, which allowed each underboss to keep 25 per cent of each week’s earnings. It remained dirty, of course, and it didn’t always amount to a massive sum, but it allowed his individual captains to pay additional staff, soldiers, runners, lookouts and the like, and to lavish a little extra wealth on themselves from time to time. It kept them happy, and encouraged them to work their people ever harder, because the larger each department’s official income, the larger its skim.
Little wonder it was now regarded as a sacrosanct perk.
But of course, what a man could make, he could also unmake.
‘Alas, we may have to pick up some of this slack ourselves,’ Pentecost said, walking around the room with that slow, heavy tread of his. ‘So … as a temporary measure, I propose that we cut the skim from twenty-five per cent to fifteen.’
There were audible murmurs of discontent. Chair legs scraped, narrowed eyes exchanged surly glances.
‘It’s a proposal at present,’ Pentecost added, no tension in his voice. ‘But I want you to consider it very seriously, gentlemen. These are difficult times, as we’ve already discussed. Even now, it may not seem necessary that we prepare a war-chest, but wars often happen when you’re least expecting them.’
‘Yo, Bill,’ Merryweather protested, ‘if you’re talking about cancelling the skim …’
‘I’m not talking about cancelling it, I’m talking about trimming it.’
‘A ten per cent cut is some trim,’ Toni Zambala pointed out.
‘Slashing it then. Never fear, there’ll be something left.’
More mutters of irritation.
‘Gentlemen, you surprise me.’ Pentecost strolled back to his own end of the table. ‘Are we not the ruling elite? Do you seriously expect the burden of these losses to fall elsewhere when we ourselves –’ he tossed the paperwork down the table ‘– are directly responsible for them?’
‘If there are losses across the board, Bill,’ Al Reed ventured, ‘couldn’t it just be the effect of austerity?’
‘Austerity is something that impacts on the ordinary,’ Pentecost replied. ‘On those who lack the means and the will to resist it. We are immune to austerity, because we are the extraordinary.’
‘Don’t we get to vote on this?’ Trueman wondered.
Pentecost
