Lenny pondered this, stroking his sharp little chin. Gallagher watched him. He didn’t like Jews – the Germans, now, they’d had the right idea on what to do with Christ’s crucifiers. He kept his views on the matter quiet, of course, but there were influential people who shared them, as he had cause to know. Some of them were in parliament, and were even hotter on the subject than he was.

Little Lenny was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

‘I’ve got to tell you, Neddy,’ he said, ‘I don’t much like the sound of this.’

Gallagher smiled, showing his dentures.

‘And I’ve got to tell you, Jew boy,’ he said softly, ‘that I don’t give a fuck whether you like it or not.’

Lenny swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He didn’t mind being insulted, he was used to it, but Gallagher was frightening, when he chose to be.

‘All right, all right,’ he said, grinning uneasily in the big man’s face. ‘Keep your hair on.’

Gallagher shifted on the chair and settled into the wings of his overcoat.

‘It’s a foreign job,’ he said. ‘That’s why we need someone international, who knows his way around.’

‘Foreign where?’

‘Foreign none of your bloody business where.’ Lenny nodded. He was impervious to such rebuffs. ‘All I need is for you to find me someone,’ Gallagher went on grindingly, ‘a name, a phone number, some kind of contact.’

Lenny nodded again, nibbling on whatever there was or wasn’t in his mouth.

‘Is this a terminal job we’re talking about?’ he asked.

‘There’s a person who disappeared who has turned up again, and who needs to be gone for good.’

Lenny puffed out his cheeks and let them deflate with a pop.

‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘Right.’

He had finished his drink and was toying pointedly with his glass. Gallagher chose not to take the hint. Lenny sighed, then remembered to refresh his grin. He wore this grin all day. At night, Gallagher thought, he must crawl off to whatever hole it was he lived in and take it off in front of the mirror, peel it off like a rubber mask, and put it away for use again the next day.

‘Funny thing,’ Lenny said, still jogging his empty glass.

‘What?’ Gallagher said, suspicious.

‘A coincidence. I spoke to a fellow today, in here, in this very place, who might be just the operator you’re looking for.’

‘What sort of fellow?’

‘Irish, or used to be, based in England.’

‘I suppose that’s international enough. Name?’

Lenny grinned.

‘Whoa up there, big boy,’ he said. ‘First there’s the fee to be discussed.’