A Regular Belasco

 

I was hiding behind the drapes in the library at Schoenhausen, Lawwell's country retreat, when a curious thing happened: Lawwell had a box wheeled in and as the assembled lawyers stood around nervously sucking on their cigars, Lawwell walked calmly past the metal box and let his hand sweep along the top before inspecting his palm as if to look for traces of dust. It was all a big show, there was no dust, only pantomime and these guys were the clowns, wound up by Lawwell and thrown onto the stage of Scottish football to make fools of themselves in pursuit of Rangers. Lawwell knew his men well, knew he could count on solid Celtic men to disregard the threat to their reputations and professional standing, knew that their hatred of Rangers would see them to the end of the show and when the curtains closed then hopefully there'd be no more Rangers and Lawwell's job would be done. But Celtic men or no, just to remind them how high were the stakes, Lawwell produced Stewart Regan in a box.

There were coughs as the lawyers were told who was inside the gleaming contraption. "We'd wondered where he was the past few weeks" someone said as others continued to splutter and one brave or foolish soul asked if it wasn't all too much, keeping one of our own locked up and received a lash across the cheek from Lawwell's horse whip for his trouble.

"Gentlemen," began Lawwell. "I bring you the Regan Paradox - inside this box sits our man at the SFA. With him is a phial of deadly gas and an unstable radioactive isotope. You can guess the rest."

"Well actually, we can't" said one of the lawyers hesitantly.

"Of course you can't, you're lawyers! If you were so good at guessing then you might have guessed that this plan of ours might not turn out the way we'd hoped, that one of you morons would get all flushed in the face and blurt out that, what was it again, "you bastards have been cheating us for eleven years"? Was that it? Did you guess that was going to happen? Because I sure as hell didn't, am I paying you idiots to behave like the Green Brigade? Of course not - you cost a damned sight more than the price of a few Irish Republican themed banners so remember who you are, who you're working for and screw the fucking nut or you're next in the box!"

He was raving by now and I thought his guests had got the message but then one of them asked, "so is Regan alive or dead then?"