Chapter 21: Bar Talk

It was the following day. Harry and I were sat in a small bar in a hotel overlooking the river. He'd been up in town for a meeting with Freddie. I felt that at least owed him a drink for helping sort out Rachel. He'd been good enough not to make too much of a joke of it around the place, too. He'd been sympathetic about what happened and gave me a bit of a lecture on not turning my back on work in progress. Nothing I didn't deserve. I wasn't going to let it happen again.

It was mid afternoon and we were almost the only ones in the room. A group of three girls sat on stools at the bar, chatting and laughing. We took our beers off to a quiet corner. I could see Harry was giving each of the girls an appraising look.

"See anything you like?" I said.

Harry took a pull on his bottle of beer and spoke under his breath. "Hmm, maybe $120,000. The one on the left possibly a bit more than $40k, not sure. Sparky, ought to train well. Easy pick up too, careless with her stuff — see how she's just left her handbag on the floor. It's a sure sign - no idea about her surroundings - you'd bag her before she knew anything was happening. Other two might go down well with the eastern Europeans, shape's all right, weight's all right. Nothing special though — can't see them fetching the sort of margins we're looking for now."

"Silly of me, I guess," I said. "I wasn't really talking shop."

Harry chuckled, putting his beer down on the table. "Oh, sorry."

"I sort of meant, what do you do for fun?"

He stared down at the beer bottle. I wondered if I had touched a raw nerve. "Larry, you're right," he said. "I guess doing this you stop seeing women as fun and start seeing them just as dollars and shipping weight. Quite a lot of the time it's as if they're not wearing clothes even. You can watch their naked bodies as they walk by — you've seen so many of them stripped, you know what they'll be like. The only surprise now when you get them naked is whether they've had themselves tattooed. I wish they wouldn't do that though, it's much harder to shift the ones with marks — especially some of the designs. We had one we picked up a while back, had so little spare flesh we could barely find space to put a bar code on her."

I nodded.

Harry went on. "It's odd really. You stop thinking of them as people at all. Take the one in the middle — she's wearing an engagement ring. So I'm thinking, watch out for the fiancé turning up at an inconvenient moment, maybe he's a possible patsy for her disappearance. That portfolio case propped up against her stool — looks like she might be a bit arty — could mean she gets to galleries; great snatch venues, plenty of quiet corners. Slim build, blonde hair — maybe your Caribbean pal would like her; looks like she'd be good between the shafts of a pony cart." She looked up, noticed that Harry was looking at her and smiled. Harry stared blankly, ignoring her look, and went on talking. "Whereas actually she's this really nice, normal, girl who does a perfectly good job in an ad agency somewhere and has slipped out for a bit of fun with her girl friends on a Thursday afternoon before she goes home to fuck the arse off her fiancé tonight. Somehow you don't think about their real lives, except like it helps plan the snatch." Harry looked up as a waitress made her way over from the bar. "Uh-oh," he said, with a grin, "Here comes $50k."

The waitress came over to our table, picked up my empty bottle and put it on her tray. "You boys all right?" she asked. We nodded. "Do you want another beer?" she asked me. I said, "Sure." Harry shook his head. Two other guys on the far corner of the bar were calling out to the three girls. The girls were ignoring them. Pointedly. "Jeez," our waitress said, "you'd think this was some sort of slave market the way some men carry on. They treat them like they're pieces of meat."

"Shocking," said Harry. One of the girls span round in response to some remark or other and raised a finger to the two men. One of them started to get to his feet. The waitress went over to try to calm things down. She was standing with her back to us, hands on hips as she argued with the men. "Nice arse," said Harry, quietly. "She'd be good for some of the spankers we've got on the books. Strapped down, with that up in the air, nicely framed with garter belt and stockings, you could see the price going up." She was pointing at the door. The two men got to their feet and made a few abusive remarks before up-ending a beer bottle and storming out. The waitress got a cloth and started cleaning up. "There," said Harry, "domestic skills too. The price is going up all the time."