The café’s front window was filled with cheap Greek travel brochures and photographs, as well as a planning order and notice to customers that the café was to undergo refurbishment. The door had a broken blind with a ‘Closed’ sign on it. As John knocked on the door he was encouraged by the fact that it was difficult to see into the café from the street. At first there was no answer so he knocked again and a few seconds later the door was unlocked and inched open. The man who answered was a fifty-year-old muscular Greek with iron-grey hair. He had a hard, lined face with a jutting chin and bad teeth, along with bulging thickset hairy arms and a barrel-shaped chest. The top four buttons of his white shirt were open revealing a gold chain and coin pendant engraved with an owl with oversized piercing eyes, not dissimilar to the man’s own.
‘You Silas?’
‘Who wanna know?’
‘You do souvki takeaway?’ John asked, using the prearranged introduction his father had given him. The scribbled notes had been hard to read as they were written in pencil on Izal toilet paper and were badly creased, due to being refolded so many times in order to fit into the small matchbox.
‘You mean souvlaki?’ Silas spoke with a strange accent, a mixture of Greek and Cockney.
‘Yeah, I’m John Bent-’
‘No last name, first only, you come in,’ he said in a staccato manner.
John stepped inside as Silas looked outside, quickly glancing up and down the road before relocking the door. They shook hands and Silas jerked his head for John to follow him. The interior of the café was small and shoddy, with six tables covered in plastic red-and-white-checked sheets. A refrigerated display counter contained a number of plastic bowls with different sandwich fillings and olives, while cakes and Greek pastries were arranged to one side next to baskets of sliced bread and rolls. There was a large espresso machine, and an array of bottles and sauces on dusty shelves behind the counter.
Silas led John to a back room; the doorway had a greasy multicoloured plastic strip curtain hanging across it. Inside there were boxes and boxes of what appeared to be tins of tuna, vine leaves and assorted vegetables stacked on unsteady-looking shelves.
‘You wanna a coffee or sometink, or shall we just get on wiv it?’
‘I’d like to see where we start, and do you have a back yard so we can bring in the equipment or does it all have to come in via the front?’
‘I have yard, but maybe good if decorating stuff come in front way during first day to make it look real. I still open café in day and you work at night so look like I still keep business going. Anyone ask I say basement being converted for more seating as I expanding, so there should be no problem.’
Silas flicked on a light switch and John followed him down stone stairs into a large dank basement.
‘You got a power source down here?’
‘I got big set of cables with long leads, plenty power for down here.’
They stood side by side facing an old whitewashed brick wall. Silas slapped his palm against it. ‘This also bank’s wall. You smash through here, dig tunnel and vault is on other side, but you gotta thick concrete floor base that is gonna take hours of drilling – they say it supposed to be impenetrable.’
‘Bloody hell, it’s a lot of work,’ John said quietly.
‘Yeah and we only work through night and stop 5 a.m. before light and people about on streets. I open café at seven but only during week. I close weekends cos no local business open.’
‘I’m going to have to get some wooden RSJs and Acro props for that wall if we want to knock through it.’
‘What you mean?’
‘The wall here will not be that difficult to get through, but it’s a supporting wall so I need to put up support planks where we remove the bricks, which we’ll have to do slowly. Last thing I want is the whole lot collapsing in on us.’
‘Too bloody right,’ Silas said, looking concerned.
‘You know how thick the concrete floor is below the deposit vault?’
‘I hear is plenty thick, built three years ago. If we can’t drill our way in, we might need explosives to blast through.’
‘Blasting is a last resort. I’ve got a heavy-duty Kango hammer drill but I reckon it will be too weighty and awkward for even two of us to lift and drill upwards.’
‘So what you do?’
‘Get a smaller one which is more fucking cash out of my pocket.’
‘I also hear the concrete floor has gotta thick metal mesh in it for extra strength and security.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Course I serious – why I make joke about such things?’
‘Cos it means more expense and I’m virtually out of cash as it is.’
‘Why more expense – you trade big Kango for small?’
‘I’ll think about it, but I’ll need an angle grinder to cut through the mesh.’
‘No problems, I give you more money, you pay me back when job done.’
‘What about alarms?’
‘I don’t have any.’
John was beginning to wonder if Silas was stupid, but realized it was just the language barrier. ‘I mean in the fucking bank. I’ve got someone on board who’s a good bell man but he needs to know what he’s up against to disarm it.’
