The Set-Up by Felix Riley

Author:Felix Riley [Riley, Felix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141966670
Goodreads: 60441659
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

22

The tiny store in Little Italy had a slim single window beside the door. The window was completely taken up with a poster advertising ‘Alternative Medicine’ that the sun had bleached to almost nothing years ago. I jammed a finger against the decrepit buzzer for a prolonged period, knowing that anything less wouldn’t get her attention. Martinez looked at me, puzzled.

‘We’re going to save the president with homeopathy?’

I raised a less than impressed eyebrow at her.

‘Who is it?’ The female Hungarian voice coming through tinny from the small speaker.

‘Byrne.’

‘I’m kind of busy – can it wait?’

‘Yeah, I’m here because it can wait.’

‘All right, all right, but you’ll have to give me a minute.’

There was a loud buzz which signalled for me to thump the door with the heel of my hand. It swung open and I waved Martinez in.

Once inside she took in her surroundings with the usual suspicion that the room provoked. Apart from the counter at the end of the very narrow store there was nothing but shelves down both sides sparsely filled with alternative medicine products no less than a decade old. At the end, blocking off the rear of the store, was a counter with a flat-screen television on it. Sitting before it on a stool behind the counter was the store’s owner, Gabriella Hudec, playing a Second World War shoot ’em up on a flat-screen TV on the right hand wall.

I made my way through the gloom of the neglected store to the counter and leaned against it, watching Gabriella play her game. Her tidy boyish looks, cropped hair and black, thick-rimmed glasses were somehow contra to the slovenly clothes she wore, a T-shirt dragged over a long-sleeve top, like she had dressed efficiently rather than smart, all function over form. The Hungarian made no attempt to look up or indulge in pleasantries. On the screen her computer-generated American G.I. character was negotiating its way through a bombed-out town slaughtering German soldiers at a rate General Patton would have been proud of.

Martinez’s face told me she was getting increasingly bewildered – and frustrated – that we were taking in what seemed like a diversion. On the screen I watched the game’s American G.I. machine-gun his way through half a dozen Germans.

‘That’s a lot of Nazis you’re killing there.’

Gabriella didn’t waver from her game play. ‘It’s cheaper than therapy. Bastards raped my grandmother.’

Martinez was outraged. ‘They did that in the game?’

The Hungarian looked at her for the first time, doubting what she’d just heard. ‘No, in real life.’ She tossed her gamepad onto the counter, casting a doubtful look at me, questioning my taste in friends.

I pulled out my smartphone and held it towards her. ‘I need to trace a call urgently.’

Gabriella spoke matter-of-factly. ‘Why didn’t you say it was urgent?’ She whipped the phone from my hand, lifted up a portion of the counter to let us through then walked away through a curtain towards the back.

Martinez lingered a moment, uncertain, so I followed behind the store-owner before she followed on behind.

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