BOOK 1: HERMIONE GRANGER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE
Chapter 2: A Gangster and a Baby
Twelve Years Earlier
It was a night to make you believe in demons. The rain spat sharp onto streets, where instead of washing away the grime it seemed to simply add to it, mixing the motor oil and gutter refuse and loose trash into an unholy stew. The ricochet of raindrops off of brick walls and puddled sidewalks made mockery of those who relied on umbrellas for protection.
The heavy clouds blocked out any moonlight, and the street lamps and car headlights reflected off of the shimmering surfaces in gyrating points that almost made them worse than no light at all.
Big Chris didn't like it. He'd had every light in the place turned on, and still it felt dim, like the night itself was pressing in and all God's angels and Norweb together were barely holding it at bay.
What Big Chris wanted to do more than anything right now was to curl up in bed with a book and a cuppa. What he was supposed to want was to be at home with his newborn daughter, but a man had to be honest with himself.
What he was actually doing was neither. Big Chris had work to do, and it would be a poor show to cancel a meeting he had called himself just so he could go to bed. So, despite the fact that a small part of Big Chris was sure that the devil himself was waiting in the dark, he was sitting in a warehouse listening to updates from his lieutenants. At least he was inside, he supposed.
The warehouse didn't strictly belong to Big Chris. It was one of many such properties that had been abandoned in recent decades, the goods they were built to house now made cheaper in some overseas port where bosses weren't constrained to pay minimum wages. Big Chris had taken on a few of them for his own uses, and the police were more than happy to look the other way as long as whatever went on inside was never brought to their attention.
The particular room Big Chris used as his office and boardroom was far more comfortable than an abandoned warehouse had any right to be. Big Chris had an arrangement with the contracting and construction crews that worked on the west and northwest portions of Greater Manchester. They paid a modest fee, and none of their projects got burnt down at inopportune moments. Big Chris was a reasonable man, though, and if a particular crew didn't have the cash for their dues that month, he was willing to accept payment in kind. The room he was in now, for instance, had been a damp, dilapidated dump before Dewey & Long Construction Ltd had made the room as comfortable as their extremely motivated imaginations could make it.
Big Chris sat in a leather executive chair, in front of a large mahogany table, which matched the raised paneling on the walls. The carpet was crimson, thick enough to dull the concrete underneath but not so thick as to be tasteless. A well-used bar lined one wall, and in this private space Big Chris kept his favorites stocked. Rows of recessed lighting provided full but warm illumination, and the walls were decorated with priceless works of art that Big Chris had taken over the years as collateral for some endeavor or another.
In contrast, the men around the table would never be mistaken for works of art. They were all big men, not with the defined muscles of a pampered bodybuilder, but with the rounded bulk–and the scarred skin, and the sharp eyes–of guys who had walked into a number of dark alleys and always been the one to walk out.
Big Chris himself was like them but more so. Taller, broader, and bulkier, Big Chris combined a crisp suit and neat crew cut with a rough-hewn face and heavy jaw. Over a long career, Big Chris had honed his skill at using his sheer physical presence to establish himself as the leader of whatever group he was in.
The group settled in, grabbed drinks–whiskey, mostly, though Winston was partial to a rum and coke and Johnny drank water because once he started he could only drink to excess, and Big Chris needed clear heads at these meetings–and chatted genially. Big Chris passed around a polaroid of his daughter, who was still new enough to be worth comment, and the assembled group grunted agreement that she was a good 'un.
Then, with a nod, Big Chris opened the business portion of the evening.
"The new kid at Pixie Dust came back with less than I might of hoped last week," Bacon supplied.
"And inside?" Big Chris grunted as he looked at the man.
Bacon frowned. "Ryan was there three nights. Said the place was as busy. They, uh," Bacon looked a little red at this, "they got a new girl there, apparently she can pass for sixteen. It's been drawing more than the usual crowd."
"Any reason our new door boy might be skimming?"
"Heard he's got a kid," said Bacon. Big Chris simply looked at him over his glasses; lots of guys had kids. "That he looks after, I mean," added Bacon. "Mom isn't really up to it."
Big Chris thought about it for a moment.
"The new boy gets the usual," he said at didn't have to say more; Bacon knew what the usual was. "But send a basket to the house. Some food, some toys and books for the kid."
The message, if the boy was smart enough to read it, should be clear. And if the boy wasn't smart enough to read it? Well, there were always more people looking to work for Big Chris.
"Oh and Bacon?" Big Chris added, "swing by the club and make sure the new girl isn't actually sixteen." Pixie Dust didn't belong to Big Chris–he simply had people working the door–but he took a professional interest in ensuring that the less reputable businesses in his turf didn't risk crossing a line the police couldn't ignore.
On to the next item of business.
"Any word on Eddie?" It was the same question Big Chris had been asking for the past two months. He looked around at the grimaces and shaking heads, and let out a soft curse for the goddamned Arrows.
The Arrows had appeared out of nowhere and started pushing into Manchester the year before. They were hardly the first rivals Big Chris had dealt with, but while the others had fallen to the time-tested techniques of bribes, blackmail, muscle, and the judicious employment of a few cops who were on the take, the Arrows were proving far more slippery. Big Chris hadn't even been able to figure out who was in charge of the gang or what their leadership structure was, after months of investigating.
Two months ago, Eddie Granger had come to him and told him he had a lead. Lots of people came to Big Chris promising lots of things, but it meant something different coming from Eddie. Reliable, intelligent, and creative, Eddie was a rare gem in a sea of thuggish rocks. He had a knack for getting into places he wasn't supposed to, and for making the best of it once he was there.
So when Eddie had told Big Chris that he had a way into the Arrows, Big Chris had given him a sleek, unregistered nine millimeter and a nod.
That was the last time Big Chris had seen Eddie.
At first, Big Chris had assumed the usual. Eddie had run. He'd taken however many thousands of pounds the anonymous boss of the Arrows had offered for the inside on Big Chris and was making a new life somewhere else.
He wouldn't have thought Eddie was the type, but one thing everyone in this business learned pretty quickly was that everyone was a traitor for the right price.
As the weeks stretched on, though, the details didn't add up. None of Big Chris's operations were hit before he had a chance to rearrange the details–why would the Arrows pay for information and then not make a move? Soap had broken into Eddie's flat, and found nothing that indicated he was about to run. Dirty dishes on the counters, a TV in the living room, the bits of jewelry Eddie had still in the dresser. Cash stashed here and there. If Eddie was running, why wouldn't he have taken that?
It didn't make sense.
After a month Big Chris forced himself to face what was now the most likely conclusion: that Eddie had gotten in over his head trying to get in with the Arrows, and had gotten a one-way trip to the bottom of the River Mersey for his troubles. None of his people had been able to find any evidence that this had happened, but whoever was running the Arrows was clearly a slippery bastard, so maybe disappearing a body without a trace was within their skills.
"Give it another week," said Soap, "before we tell his Ma."
They all nodded at this. Big Chris wasn't looking forward to it. He knew the reputation was that organized crime bosses were ruthless thugs who could arrange six murders before sitting down for breakfast. Ruthless thug he might be, but the truth was that Big Chris had rarely lost people in his organization, only a handful over the ten years he'd been running the gang. He hated to admit that this might be another one.
But Ma Granger deserved to know if her son was dead.
On to the next item of business.
The rest of the meeting continued in the same vein, until the slow sipping of drinks, the soft rumble of the other men's voices, and the comforting familiarity of problems faced and solved combined to make Big Chris forget for a while what a miserable night it was outside.
That pleasant forgetfulness was badly broken when the double doors at the end of the room burst open.
One of the men guarding the door staggered in, dripping wet and tracking mud. He was holding up a man who appeared only semiconscious. With a shock Big Chris realized that under an unkempt beard, it was Eddie Granger, back from the dead. With an even bigger shock, he realized that Eddie was holding what looked like, but absolutely could not possibly be, a baby.
The next morning, Big Chris was sitting in a hard plastic chair next to a small cot in Crumpsall Hospital. Lying in the cot was Eddie. He was disoriented, barely lucid, rambling on about impossible things. The same state he'd been in since he'd burst into their meeting the night before.
"She was so beautiful, like an angel… but…" Eddie shuddered, as if he were remembering something horrible.
"I shouldn't have lied to her… she always knows… I shouldn't have…"
"You're safe now," said Big Chris in a low voice. People often told Big Chris that they found his gravely baritone soothing, but today it seemed powerless to reach Eddie.
"I tried…" Eddie continued in his far-off voice, "I tried not to give them anything… but I couldn't…" Big Chris was alarmed to see tears in Eddie's eyes. Eddie looked over, and seemed to finally notice Big Chris there. "I couldn't help it. I told them about you–that you'd avenge me, or that you could pay…"
"I expect everyone breaks sooner or later," said Big Chris.
"They don't need money though, do they?" Eddie continued, as he went back to seeming unaware of Big Chris's presence. "They can make green grass into green, glamor given golden gleam…"
And then, most alarming of all, Eddie started giggling. "I think…" he started through the laughter, "I think I have a kink for minky ink, I'll link my pink, you think?" And then he dissolved into helpless giggles again. Big Chris was completely unsure what he was supposed to say to that.
It had been like this all night. The topic on which they could get any coherent answer from Eddie was that the baby in his arms was his, and that he was bound to take care of her.
"It's time for another test," said the harassed looking emergency doctor as he entered the room. He was the doctor Big Chris went to when one of his people needed medical attention but emphatically did not need police attention. The doctor was also why they had driven across town to Crumpsall. Crooked police were a dime a dozen, but finding a doctor with enough leverage to be trusted was a much harder problem, and Big Chris was still working on getting one closer to home.
The test was the same as before. What's your name? What year is it? Who is the Prime Minister?
"It doesn't matter," Eddie responded to that last question. "Those in power aren't who you think they are… if only you knew…"
It was all in the same vein–Eddie either ignored the questions completely or gave a nonsensical answer.
"I can't really say what's wrong with him," said the harassed looking emergency doctor in a low voice. "All the physical scans tests have come back fine, he seems perfectly healthy, except that he hardly knows who he is. The only thing it might be…" the doctor hesitated, looking to Big Chris.
Big Chris took the hint. "Why don't we step outside for a minute."
They made their way out a back entrance to the hospital (the same little-used entrance they'd brought Eddie in through the night before, after a furtive phone call to have it unlocked). Down the street was a small cafe, which was currently quiet, in the way that cafes next to hospitals are always either completely quiet or completely packed, completely independent of the normal business rhythm of the city.
"There's marks up and down his body," the doctor stated without preamble. "Almost like scars. Did he have those before?"
Big Chris shook his head. "He was always a little proud of how unmarked he was. Never went in for tats like most of the others."
The doctor nodded, face grim. "So it's possible… it's possible he was held somewhere. Held somewhere and hurt."
Big Chris's face was stony. It wasn't anything he hadn't considered.
He knew that most of the world would disagree with him, but Big Chris had always considered himself a moral person. It was just that he viewed morality different from most. Most people, Big Chris had learned, thought that being moral meant following the laws that the government and the church laid down.
Big Chris felt differently. In his mind, morality was about actions and consequences. The moral person understood what the consequences of their actions were, and accepted them. The immoral person acted without examination of the repercussions.
He'd built up his organization, and his life, on the idea that actions had consequences, and that the duty of the individual was to learn to predict the consequences of their actions, so that they could always act in an informed way.
As for the law, the government made rules, and had muscle set up to break into people's homes and haul them away if they broke those rules. Big Chris did the same. The government claimed to be legitimate because they held elections; Big Chris felt the support he had in his own community gave him as least as much.
In Big Chris's mind, sending Bacon down to rough up the new kid at the door of Pixie Dust was illegal but not immoral. The kid had been told what would happen if he skimmed, and now faced the consequences. Big Chris knew what being roughed up felt like, and had a clear view of the potential outcomes of ordering it done in this case. He was acting in full examination of the repercussions, accepting which ones would come.
The banker in a glass tower in Canary Wharf, who signs this document or that, moving money with a stroke of a pen, neither knowing nor caring that a thousand people will be thrown out of work as a result? That was a person who was immoral. And yet society viewed the banker as living inside the law, and Big Chris living outside of it, which told Big Chris everything he needed to know about the opinions of "society."
And in Big Chris's mind, the most moral thing he had ever done was at the very start of his career, when he saw that the criminals that were running Salford at the time were sadists, interested only in stripping as much of their own pleasure out of the community as they could. Big Chris had made it his goal to take them down, and over the course of years he had.
And he'd be damned if he let another gang in the same mold push him out.
"So what's the prognosis, then?" Big Chris said after a long moment.
"I can't really say for sure," the doctor replied. "This isn't exactly my area of expertise. I've never seen anything like those markings on him–they're not burns, not even scars exactly, and I can't even say for sure that they're related to Mr. Granger's cognitive difficulties. He could have taken brain damage that we can't detect. Hell, for all we know, he had a completely unrelated stroke out of the blue–that happens sometimes. There's just too many unknowns here."
"But you think they are related."
"His symptoms–like I said, they're strange and I can't say for sure, but if I had to guess–I'd say he was traumatized and his mind is coping with it as best it can."
Big Chris grimaced and stared out the window. His plans for the Arrows had, at one point, included the possibility of accommodation: whoever was in charge over there was clearly competent, so he'd thought they might be able to reach an agreement of some kind.
But now? Big Chris wouldn't stop until every last one of the devils was dead or in jail. They needed to learn that actions have consequences.
There was one last part of this impossible puzzle. "What about the baby?"
"Seems perfectly healthy. We'd be able to get a better look if we could move her, but Mr. Granger just about has a fit any time we try to take her out of the room. She's been kept fed and changed. The maternity ward has an unofficial policy of looking the other way when formula and diapers go missing. I don't think this is the scenario they were envisioning when they set that up, but it works for us."
Big Chris had seen this for himself. The times when Eddie seemed the most lucid were the ones he was talking to the baby.
Big Chris had a lot on his mind as he walked down to the nearest payphone and sent a call to Bacon.
"I need you to pick up Ma Granger and bring her to Crumpsall." There was silence on the other end of the line.
"Can't Soap do it?"
"I'm asking you to do it."
"It's just—she's not going to be happy."
"I think you can handle one old dear."
Another pause on the line.
"Or Soap could handle her," Bacon tried again.
"Just get her over here. She needs to see Eddie."
"You're the boss, boss," Bacon admitted grudgingly.
Ma Granger was one of the informal group of grandmothers who ran the day-to-day family life of Salford. Nobody in their right mind would leave men in charge, since the men of the town typically spent their time drinking, looking for work (while drunk), or more than likely claiming they were looking for work while they drank, got into fights, or did worse.
Then they would stumble home in the dark hour of the morning, to be patched up by a wife or girlfriend or whore, so they could go out again the next day and "look for work."
An outsider may have believed that these women were remarkably forgiving, to spend the day griping about the shiftless men in their lives, and then play nurse through the night after their own bad decisions came to predictable ends. But beneath the griping was a great swell of pity. They all knew, though nobody ever spoke of it (because what good would that possibly do) that the men around them had been taught since their earliest memories that their purpose in life was to provide for their families–raised on stories of great men who fought and built and led–and then they had been left with noone to fight and nothing to build, barely able to provide for themselves.
So the women organized, and the women of Ma Granger's generation most of all, to ensure that, for the most part, food went to tables and children went to school and those who might take advantage of the situation were brought to the attention of the relevant powers.
An hour and forty five minutes later, Bacon pulled up his car, got out, and stepped around to open the back door for his passenger, as if he were a proper limousine driver.
The woman who stepped out of the car was small, so short that she couldn't take the arm Bacon proffered without stretching up to it, which she was clearly not going to do. She squinted at the back entrance to the hospital through oversized, plastic-framed bifocals. An ankle-length, floral print cotton skirt peeked out below a long canvas overcoat. Her hair was a light gray, and curled close to her head.
She marched up to Big Chris and said without preamble, "Now what has my idiot boy gotten himself into this time?"
"Well ma'am," Big Chris started, "Eddie was in need of some treatment–"
"In need of treatment? You mean he was hurt on one of your jobs. Unless it's normal for visitors to enter through the back alley here?"
"Right," replied Big Chris, recovering quickly. Big Chris had stood down far more terrifying creatures than this tiny old woman and survived. At that very moment he couldn't think of any specific examples, but he was confident that he must have at some point.
He led Ma Granger into the service hallway, and up to the room they were keeping Eddie. He stopped outside the door. Big Chris swallowed.
"Now, Ma, you might want to prepare yourself. Eddie is…"
"He is what he is, and whatever that is I'll find out sooner if you move out of the way and let me in. You've done a lot of things in your life, Christopher, but I don't recall that graduating medical school was one of them."
Big Chris stepped into the small room after Ma Granger.
"Mum… you came," Eddie breathed out, and for a moment his face was transformed. Gone was the Salford gangster who'd put down Mad Tony without shedding a tear. The scarred, thirty-something man on the bed looked like nothing more than a little kid, grateful that his mum had come to rescue him.
Eddie broke down and started sobbing, and cold bastard though he was, Big Chris was hard pressed not to join him.
"There, there, now, it's okay," said Ma Granger, the tiny woman holding her much larger son.
After Eddie had sobbed himself out, rambling incoherently the whole time, he laid back on his cot, eyes half-closed, and seemed to achieve the first measure of peace that Big Chris had seen since he had burst through the doors of their meeting the night before.
That was when Ma Granger took a look around the room.
"Christopher," she said crisply, "would you be so good as to tell me why there is a baby sleeping in the corner?"
"Well," Big Chris began, but discussion of the event roused Eddie.
"She's mine!" he interjected forcefully. "Mum, she's mine. She's the only… the only good thing…"
"Eddie seems to think the baby's his," Big Chris added.
"Why yes, Christopher, I had gathered that from the fact that he just said so."
Big Chris nodded, and then shuffled out of the door and walked back down the hall to give Ma some privacy with her son.
"Soap," he called on his way out, "can you check with Ma Granger what she's going to do with the baby?" The baby wasn't really Big Chris's concern, but it was a loose end, and Big Chris didn't like to leave those unattended, especially ones that could end up involving social services.
Two days after leaving Eddie with his Ma at Crumpsall, Big Chris was checking in on a bookkeeping operation. Big Chris liked to keep these visits flexible and secret, both because he got better feedback on how his operations were actually run if they hadn't known he was checking in that day, and because he had more than a few enemies who might someday take advantage of a predictable schedule.
Ma Granger was waiting for him in the spectator's box.
"Christopher," she greeted, "I was hoping I'd run into you here."
Big Chris could only nod at his unexpected companion. Ma Granger grabbed a beer as they watched dogs race around the track below.
"Eddie's moved home, and he won't be able to support himself again until he's better, which may never happen," she stated baldly.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Big Chris murmured, his deep voice carrying through the cheers of the crowd around them. "You know he'll always have friends in Salford."
"Which is a great comfort, to be sure," replied Ma Granger. "But there is one other consideration."
Ma Granger paused. Nora's Pride in lane two won the race at eighteen to one, and the crowd cheered and groaned, depending on where they had bet.
"The child," said Ma Granger.
"The child?" asked Big Chris.
"I'll take her," Ma Granger said, "but you'll provide for her."
"Provide?" asked Big Chris, "And what am I providing?"
"A head start," replied Ma Granger. "I'll raise her, though I'm far too old to be chasing after a toddler. And you'll provide an education. She goes to the same schools as Ethel."
"Ethel?" rumbled Big Chris, at the name of his own child. "Her mum's got her down for Oakbank the minute she starts primary. Twelve a year that one is."
"Then she goes to Oakbank," Ma said firmly. "My Eddie gave up his health and sanity for your little pissing contest, the least you can do is look after his kid."
"Those bastards will pay for what they did to your son," said Big Chris.
"And what good will that do him? Is offing some other gang boss going to give him back his sanity? The only thing he seems to care about is that little girl, so if you want to make it up to him, you'll see that she has a good start in life."
A sharp crack rang out through the air as the next race started.
"Fine," Big Chris said at last. "She can go wherever Ethel goes. Maybe I can talk her mom into state school…"
They sat in silence for a moment, drinking their beer.
"Do you have a name for her yet?"
"Eddie had already named her, if you'd thought to ask," replied Ma Granger. "I don't know where he came up with it, but he insists that her name is Hermione."