Lenny’s father, long dead, had been a rag-and-bone man around the Liberties and the Coombe. His mother still ran a Shylock business, in a small way, from a sweetshop in Clanbrassil Street. She was immune from prosecution thanks to Lenny, and Lenny’s contacts. He visited her sometimes, and brought her back little gifts from his frequent travels around the world.

Lenny was always busy, taking the ferry to Holland or the train to Marseilles, sailing to the Channel Islands with a briefcase chained to his wrist, or flying to mysterious places on the shores of Asia, to talk to shady people about dodgy deals, or, as he would have said, hobnobbing with bigwigs and clinching lucrative contracts. Guns, it was always guns, that was his trade. No one knew how it was he hadn’t been nabbed long ago and locked up – no one, except the knowing few, including Ned Gallagher and the Minister of Defence, Doctor William Latimer. Lenny had a lot of friends, whether they liked it or not.

‘You going to tell me why you’ve summoned me up here to the Ritz, Neddy?’ he said.

He always called Gallagher by this pet name, which he had invented and which no one else used, and which annoyed Gallagher intensely.

‘There’s a bit of business that needs seeing to,’ Gallagher said, lowering his voice. ‘I thought you’d be the man to suggest someone who might take it on.’

‘What sort of business?’

‘Delicate.’

‘And what sort of someone?’

‘Someone reliable. And experienced.’

Lenny always seemed to have something in his mouth to work on, something like a seed, or a small, hard nut. It was a variant of the twitch at the side of his mouth.

‘Are we talking about the kind of someone who might be a customer of mine?’ he asked.

Lenny, some years before, had facilitated the movement of certain materials from somewhere abroad into and through the port of Belfast. It wasn’t one of his own jobs, but a thing he had been asked to do – the kind of immunity from the penalties of the law that he enjoyed came at a price. Ned Gallagher hadn’t been directly involved in the enterprise – God forbid! – but he had been apprised of it, on the quiet, through cross-border channels. The Lads up north were always in need of hardware, even though when they got it they did precious little with it. It was said by some that they sold the stuff on to more determined organisations abroad, in the Caribbean, or certain South American banana republics. It was no concern of Lenny’s where the goods he supplied ended up.

‘We’re talking here,’ Ned Gallagher said, more quietly still, ‘of somebody of a professional nature, an experienced operator with a clean record. International, not one of your usual eejits who could be depended on to shoot his own foot off.’