Kip

Kip/A project/Squeaky clean

One

I stumble down the steps and slam face-first into the door. As I slide to the ground in a daze, the enormous guy who grabbed me from the street and shoved me down the alley, grabs my collar and drags me back to standing.
“You hurt?” he barks in a gruff, dispassionate voice.
“I’m fine…”
“Alright…he doesn’t like damaged goods.”
Goods? What am I? Ten minutes ago I had just stepped on to the platform at Euston. I haven’t been home since the start of my second year and was looking forward to seeing my family and friends. And now I’m sandwiched between a door, coated in cracked green paint and a six, six wrestler with tattoos on his knuckles.
I am having a bad day.
“Go inside.”
“I’m not gonna be shot am I?”
He shrugs. Great. I push open the door and am hit by a wall of smoke. The only sound in the dingy underground bar is a dishwasher that sounds like it’s cleaning a coin collection.
From the darkness a voice calls out:
“Gatti! You found him, you old dog. Bring him to me.”
I’ve seen all the Bond movies – every last one – and none of the villains in any of those films sound like this guy who seems to be calling the shots. I round a partitioning wall and stand face-to-face with my kidnapper. He’s sitting down in a booth, leaning back, smoking a cigarette and resting his slender arms on the shoulders of two disinterested looking women.
“Get outta here.” He smacks the girls’ behinds as they scurry to the bar; adjusting the up-riding hems of their sequinned mini-dresses as they run.
“What’s going on?” I ask as I sit down.
“Jason Tyrrell,” says the man who knows my name, “have you ever made a mistake in your life?”
I think back – sure, I’ve made loads. I tell him so. He gives a short, derisory laugh.
“Really? Really? I don’t believe you have.” His hand zips under the desk and he produces a beige file with my name on it. My sweat turns ice cold. “Mr Tyrrell, it is my business to know everyone’s darkest secret. I have searched and searched for yours, and I have so far drawn a blank. Is it possible you are as good as gold?”
“I’m just a normal guy…”
“Yes, yes, that you are,” he says, rummaging through the crisp sheets of my file. “Twenty years old; majoring in English Literature – and doing rather well at it I might add – one ex girlfriend with whom your relations seem amicable; devoted parents; glittering academic and athletic career in your youth…an excellent but unremarkable résumé.”
“So why am I here?”
He purses his lips, drops the papers to the desk, leans back and drums his fingers on his thighs. Air whistles through the slit in his lips.
“I need a project,” he says, his voice chirpy and placid to the point of suggesting insanity. “You see everyone here? Every last man and woman in this bar is here because of me.” I look sideways at Gatti, whose white eyes are all but obscured by his heavy black lids. He is staring at the floor, his hands clasped together in prayer and resting on his lap. “They are all guilty of something – something I know. I have them under my thumb; they are mine – my collection.”
“You collect…people?”
“Only the interesting ones of value.”
“But why?”
“Because I can, because I’m good at it and because I don’t know any other way...”