"There's two kinds of people in this world, Benny. There's ants and there's anteaters. Which do you want to be?"

Those were the first words Sam Morgan ever said to me. I had been working at one of Sam's clubs for about six months by then but I'd only ever seen him on a couple of occasions. For some reason he took a shine to me. He called me Benny the Bar and told Colin Richardson it was time I got a promotion.

Richardson was head of personnel. He was always pleasant, polite, well groomed; he didn't look like a criminal but then few of them did. If you saw them all together in the bar you would be forgiven for thinking they were a team of senior managers holding an informal business meeting (which, in a manner of speaking, they were). But behind the good suits and the good manners they were as cold blooded and ruthless as snakes. So when Sam Morgan called me over to his table that night and asked me whether I wanted to be an ant or an anteater there was only one answer I could give.

I joined the team and rose quickly through the ranks to become head of personnel when Colin Richardson retired some years later. We threw a retirement party but Richardson didn't show up. Sam told me he'd retired to Monte Carlo. I suppose he could have drifted that way eventually if a fishing trawler hadn't picked him up first.

By this time I was caught in the middle - too far up to turn back, too far down the pecking order to hold any real aces in my hand. I took Richardson's old job because I wanted to stay alive. I had plans for a long and happy retirement that didn't involve being hauled out of the water with a bellyful of hungry crabs.

My first task in the new job was to clear up a small mess left by my predecessor. The main function of the personnel department was to vet everyone who came into contact with Sam, from lowly bar staff to foreign arms dealers. This was done largely through a network of bent coppers and shady private investigators. Getting someone's background was a little bit like mixing a salad from the self-serve counter. You took some from here, some from there, a bit from this box, a piece from that one, and usually ended up with a nicely balanced meal. But Richardson must have got careless, or lazy, and as a result Sam had unwittingly set up an arms deal with an undercover copper from Manchester. Luckily someone on the security team recognised him before Sam had done too much to incriminate himself. Lucky for Sam that it. The copper, well he was doomed.

I was ordered to deal with the policeman at the forthcoming wedding of Sam's only son, Sam junior, predictably known as Son of Sam. Strictly speaking it wasn't my job to kill people, coppers or otherwise, but Sam Morgan thought it would be a good test of character.

It was a test I had already failed. I had no intention of killing anyone, but neither did I intend to die for my principles. So far I had amassed enough evidence to incriminate myself in everything from perverting the course of justice to conspiracy to commit murder, but on Sam I had just enough to send him to prison for slightly longer than he spent on his yacht in Marbella every year. What I needed was evidence placing Sam Morgan at the scene of a serious crime. A life sentence sort of crime. Murder, say. And that evidence had to be indisputable.

The wedding ceremony was held on Sam's yacht. The staff arrived an hour before the guests and every one of us was searched by Sam's security chief, John Clayton, and two of his taciturn men. After that we were banned from leaving the boat.

As the guests arrived they were politely directed to one of the cabins, where Sam personally supervised a thorough examination of their possessions. This included the confiscation of all mobile phones, photographic equipment, and anything else that Sam didn't like the look of. Nobody complained or appeared shocked by the level of security. This was Son of Sam getting married here, not some plop from the cardboard box factory and his queen of the packing line.

The yacht sailed out into the North Sea and I went to find a quiet spot on the poop deck where I could gather my thoughts.

"Big day," a voice from behind me said.

I turned around to see John Clayton looming like a noon shadow. He was wearing a crisp white shirt with short sleeves and black Ray-Ban Wayfarers. I felt like I was being scrutinised by some hostile alien intelligence.

"For what?" I asked.

"For Sam's boy. For everyone."

I nodded, hoping the conversation would end there, but John Clayton continued to watch me with the unswerving concentration of a robotic camera. I wanted to turn and gaze out to sea again but I suddenly remembered something my father told me a long, long time before. Never turn your back on a rat, Benny, he said. That's when they leap.

Behind Clayton I could see the official photographer arranging guests into poses. Sam was standing well away from the camera with two men in dark suits and the undercover copper who had about an hour left to live. There was nothing I could do to save the copper's life but I was going to make sure that I came away from this with enough on Sam Morgan to ensure that my resignation letter didn't turn into a suicide note.

"Wait where you are when everyone goes to eat," John Clayton said at last. After a moment of inscrutable hesitation he added, "we'll eat afterwards."

The jazz quartet kicked in as Clayton turned and walked away. A waiter approached me with a tray of champagne in delicate little glasses. In a film or a story the waiter would have been an undercover policeman in secret contact with a crack assault team lurking in a fast boat somewhere out of sight. But this was real life, real gangster life, and the waiter was just an honest slob I had hired to serve drinks.

I declined the champagne. The waiter smiled neutrally and moved on, and I waited alone and sober until Sam took the microphone from the leader of the jazz band and told everyone that lunch was about to be served in the downstairs dining room. Waiters and bodyguards ushered everyone downstairs until the only people out in the open were Sam and some of his guards, the bobby from Manchester and a quiet cocktail barman who had got himself in too deep.

"Benny, come and join us!" Sam called.

I pulled my tie away from my throat and went across to where the small group was gathered. John Clayton and two of his heavies were standing very close to the copper, skulking patiently over his shoulder like darkly cloaked carrion birds.

"Have you met Paul?"

We shook hands. Paul - that was his real Christian name - was relaxed and unsuspicious. His grip was strong but not tight; the only sweat on my palm was my own.

"Benny's my new head of personnel," Sam said with a wink. "Isn't that right, Benny?"

I smiled faintly and nodded.

"We were about to have a private drink away from the ladies. Will you join us, Benny?" Sam didn't wait for an answer. He put a friendly hand on the back of Paul's neck and steered him away. I was left facing John Clayton and his two dark angels.

"Frankie says relax," Clayton said. He grinned the kind of ferociously friendly grin you would expect from a cannibal.

"You kill me," I muttered. I turned and followed Sam and Paul down a spiral staircase to a small function room below deck. Inside were two bouncers wedged into corners like ornamental lamps and a thin young man wiping glasses behind a bar.

"We'll get our own drinks," Sam told the barman. "Benny the Bar's here now. You push off and chow down with the dogs."

The young barman left - gratefully, it seemed - and I went behind the bar. Sam told everyone to sit, sit, and stop acting like spare pricks at a wedding. That got a dry chuckle from John Clayton and his two ghostly companions.

I poured a healthy measure of JD's for everyone.

"You want anything with that, Paul?" I asked.

Paul eyed his glass bewilderedly. "There's no room. Are you trying to kill me, Benny, or what?"

Sam laughed uproariously. John Clayton hissed a cold, reptilian snigger.

"Paul is from Manchester," Sam said. He picked up his glass and gave me a look that said I'd better take a quick gulp myself. "He wants to take all the drug business away from the darkies. He wants guns. Show him your weapon, Benny."

That was my cue. Now I was supposed to take the silenced Browning from the holster under my jacket and shoot the policeman between the eyes. Instead I picked up a soda siphon and squirted a little water into my drink.

Sam gave me a look of thunderous, God-like wrath. You are just as dead as the other one, that look said.

"There's two kinds of people in this world," Sam said slowly. He spoke with growling, sincere loathing. "There's fish and there's fish food. Guess which you are?"

I watched in horror and fascination as intelligence and rationality burned out of Sam Morgan's eyes like the last dwindling light from a candle. In its place was something cruel and insane and utterly implacable.

"I find that people split neatly into two groups," Sam said in that strange, growling tone. "There's people you can trust, and people you can't. I don't like people who pretend to be one thing when really they're something else."

I thought I could hear my heart beating, a startled, flapping sound of panic like bats driven from a cave. Paul on the other hand looked remarkably calm, as if the full extent of his predicament had yet to sink in.

"My point," Sam said forcefully, "in case you haven't got it yet, is this-"

He snatched a large corkscrew from the bar and thumped it into the top of Paul's skull. Paul's eyes popped wide open in a muted, hammy expression of comical surprise. He hopped down from the barstool and bolted for the door, his arms flailing in wild, desperate motion.

"Get him!" Sam barked. He picked up a magnum of expensive champagne and charged after Paul like a small angry elephant, graceless and unstoppable. Paul, whose brain had probably been pierced by the tip of the corkscrew, smacked clumsily into the door and bounced off it again, then wheeled around and came running back the other way. Sam swung the big champagne bottle through the air and only managed to avoid killing John Clayton by the thickness of a spider's web. The base of the bottle connected with Paul's jaw. There was a sickening crack of bone like the sound of a roof tile snapping in two. Paul sun round in a circle, his arms outstretched, like a clothes pole caught by a sudden gust of wind. He came to rest against the bar and clawed feebly at the surface before slumping to the carpet.

Then it was my turn to die.

Sam, his shoulder's hunched, the champagne bottle clutched in his fist like a club, was now completely possessed by the demon raging inside him. His nostrils flared as his big chest expanded and deflated with quick, gulping breaths. He sounded like a piece of hulking great steam machinery on the verge of blowing a piston. He lumbered towards me, his eyes shining with rabid hate.

"Benny!" he hissed. "Pour me a drink!"

"I'll move this," John Clayton said. He took hold of the dead man's left foot and motioned at one of his heavies to grab the other. I got busy fixing Sam a drink as Paul's body began to slide grotesquely across the carpet.

"Listen, Sam," I started to say as I pushed a tumbler of whiskey and dry across the bar. "What happened there…well, I guess I just-"

Sam cut me off by simply placing one finger to his lips like a primary school teacher. He straightened the lapels of his jacket, adjusted his tie, and then finally took a sip of his drink. He smiled absently. "Always tastes better when you make it."

"I'm Benny The Bar," I said, and Sam nodded.

"A man should die with dignity, Benny. Do you agree?"

"Sure, Sam," I said quickly. "Not coppers though, eh?"

Sam raised his eyes to mine. He looked a little shocked. "Oh yes, even coppers. No man should die like a cartoon, Benny." He downed the rest of his drink in one and then pushed the tumbler across the bar. We both stared at it. "Keep pouring, Benny," he said ominously. "And pray that it seriously affects my judgement."

My luck was in that day. I made it back to shore and heard nothing from Sam until the following morning, when a curt message on my answering machine instructed me to be at Sam's house at eleven thirty on the dot. That left me with just enough time to pack a suitcase and pay a quick but important visit on the way over there.

I began the meeting by tendering my resignation.

"I think you're seriously underestimating your involvement here," Sam said. He was smiling benignly at me across a desk the width of a snooker table. In fact there was a snooker table in the room, a full-sized match table on which John Clayton and a dark, watchful man with a Mexican moustache were sedately nudging balls, but even that stately piece of furniture was overshadowed by Sam's desk. It wasn't so much its size as what it represented. This was the Captain's Table, and if you were summoned here it was usually to receive some kind of punitive sentence.

"I'm not underestimating anything, Sam," I said. "All I'm trying to say is that I've had enough."

Sam sighed deeply. "We've all had enough, Benny. Nobody likes the business we're in, but that's the business we're in." He shrugged his big shoulders and rested his palms on the desk. None of us gets to choose our destiny. All we get to choose is the route we take there. I chose to take the high road, because the champagne's better and you get someone in to do your ironing, but I'll still get where I'm going. Am I making my point, Benny?"

I felt my stomach loosen. In my mind I saw Paul windmilling through the bar with that corkscrew poking from the top of his head.

"Sam's a philosopher," a voice over my shoulder commented. I didn't need to look to know that John Clayton was now standing behind me, waiting for the signal from Sam that would see my head skewered on a snooker cue like a pickled onion on a cocktail stick.

"The thing is, Benny," Sam began, touching the tip of his chin meditatively with hands that were joined as if in prayer. "We had a deal, you and me. The deal was that you do everything I tell you to do, be that cleaning my pool, pouring my drinks, or shooting my enemies. And if you do a deal with the devil you can't just expect to break the contract whenever it suits you. It gets hot in hell, Benny, but then you knew that when you joined. And the devil…"

"He's got your soul," John Clayton whispered eagerly.

Sam smiled with parental pride. "That's right, he's got your soul, Benny."

"And I've got photographs," I said.

Sam raised a quizzical eyebrow. "Photographs of what, Benny?" he asked with almost playful curiosity.

"Of the wedding…the murder."

Sam laughed softly as he took a revolver from a drawer and placed it on the desk. "Nobody could have smuggled a camera onto that boat. We searched everyone. My friend standing behind you even put his hand up the vicar's frock."

"You're missing something," I said. I wet my lips when Sam picked up the revolver and broke the cylinder to check the load.

"Nobody on that boat had a camera," Sam insisted. He raised the revolver and stared at me through one eye as he lined up the centre of my forehead in the sight.

"Nobody except the photographer," I said.

He didn't believe me until the photographs dropped on his desk. Even John Clayton and his silent friend had to pass them back and forth a few times before it eventually sank in. By that time Sam was just gazing at me with simple, honest dismay. His mouth opened but he never made a sound.

"How?" I said helpfully. "Well as head of personnel it was my job to find and vet a friendly photographer for your boy's wedding. Only I went to a freelance spook with a background straight out of a James Bond story. He waltzed aboard your boat with some of the most sophisticated covert camera equipment money can buy, and you didn't even bat an eyelid."

I stood up. Nobody tried to stop me leaving.

"These are copies of course," I said, indicating the photographs John Clayton was now holding. "The rest are hidden somewhere safe. Because there's two kinds of people in this world, Sam. There's those who save for a rainy day, and there's those who get pissed on. Which do you feel like?"

END