Looking Good Dead

them. Pointing disinterestedly towards an open doorway, the Albanian turned his back on the Weatherman, strutted across the room, sat down on a chair and resumed watching a football game on a television.
    The Weatherman had met the Albanian on several occasions now, and had yet to hear him speak. He wondered sometimes if he was deaf and dumb, but didn’t think so. Walking through the doorway as he was bid, he entered a much larger room in the centre of which the grossly overweight Mr Smith was seated on a sofa, his back to the French windows which overlooked the sea, concentrating on a bank of four computer screens on the coffee table in front of him and biting at a fingernail as if he was chewing a chicken bone.
    He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt open to the navel, revealing folds of hairless, pale flesh that made him look as if he had breasts. The top of his blue slacks stretched across stubby legs the width of mature tree trunks. By contrast, his tiny feet, in monogrammed velvet Gucci slippers, without socks, seemed dainty, like dolls’ feet, and his head, coiffed with immaculate silver, wavy hair bunched into a short pigtail at the back, was even more out of proportion, as if it belonged to someone twenty sizes smaller. He had so many chins that until his minuscule mouth opened and the muscles around came into play it was hard for the Weatherman to see where his face ended and his neck began.
    ‘You want lunch, John?’ Jonas Smith said, in a sharp Louisiana drawl that contained not an ounce of warmth. He jabbed a porcine finger, the skin around the nails bitten raw in places, across at a room-service trolley laden with plates of sandwiches and aluminium food covers.

    Staring down at the eau de Nil carpet, the Weatherman said, ‘Actually, I have my sandwich.’
    ‘Huh. You want a drink? Order yourself a drink and sit down.’
    ‘Thanks. Um, OK. Right. I don’t need a – um, drink. I – um . . .’ the Weatherman looked at his watch.
    ‘Then fucking sit down.’
    The Weatherman hesitated for a moment, contained his anger and moved towards the nearest chair.
    The American resumed gnawing on his nail and fixed his small, piggy eyes on the Weatherman, who unhitched his rucksack and perched himself on the edge of a chair, his eyes scanning the pile of the carpet as if searching for a pattern that was not there.
    ‘Coke? You want a Coke?’
    ‘Umm, actually, umm.’ The Weatherman looked at his watch again. ‘I have to be back by two.’
    ‘You’ll go back when I fucking tell you.’
    The Weatherman was hungry. He thought about his tofu and bean-shoot sandwich in the plastic box inside his rucksack. But the problem was he didn’t really like people watching him eat. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, which helped with his anger. ‘Fisher, German Bight, south-west four or five, veering north-west, six to gale eight. Showers. Moderate or good.’ Opening his eyes again, he noticed a glass ashtray, containing a half-smoked cigar that had gone out, on the table next to the sofa.
    ‘What’s that?’ Mr Smith said. ‘What d’you say there?’
    ‘Shipping forecast. You might need it.’
    The American, whose real name was Carl Venner, stared at the geek, well aware that he was part genius, part two chips short of a circuit board. A hostile little fuckwit with a major attitude problem. He could handle that; he’d handled worse shit in his life. The thing was to remember that right now he was useful, and when he stopped being useful, nobody would miss him.
    ‘Appreciate you coming at such short notice,’ Venner said, his mouth forming a brief smile, but there was no thaw in his voice.
    ‘Um, right.’
    ‘We have a problem, John.’
    Nodding his head, the Weatherman said, ‘OK, right.’

    There was a long silence. Sensing someone behind him, he turned his head to see the Albanian had entered the room and was standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, watching him. Two other men had joined him, flanking him. The Weatherman knew they were both Russian, although he had never been introduced to them.
    They seemed to materialize out of the walls for every meeting he had with Venner but he hadn’t figured out where they fitted in. They were unsmiling, lean, sharp-faced, with topiaried hair and sharp black suits; business associates of some kind. They always made him feel uncomfortable.
    ‘You told me that our site was not hackable,’ Mr Smith said. ‘So you want to explain to Mr Brown and