by John Gardner
“I am not joking. This is a Smith and Wesson Chiefs Special. I only tell you the manufacturer so you’ll know it can make a nasty mess of your raincoat as well as your kidneys. Your quest is over.”
“What quest?” He tried to put a laugh in it.
“For the holy grail. You just found it.”
“The holy grail?”
“Me. I’m the holy grail. The name’s Oakes. Brian Ian Oakes, known to his confidantes as Boysie.”
“So?”
“So you’ve spent the evening watching my pad and following me.”
“Have I?”
“You know bloody well you have.” This was getting a little difficult. The rigid finger bit right out in the open was the kind of thing liable to attract attention. He decided to increase the pressure. “I want to know who sent you, and why. I shall count three. If you don’t render the info I shall make this firestick speak with leaden tongue and you’ll be spread all over the concrete.”
“And you’ll be none the wiser.”
“The one who takes your place will talk. Or the one after him. They’ll have to be good. I was on to you sharp enough.”
“Bloody sharp,” growled Grey Raincoat. “I bin watching you for a week.”
“One …” said Boysie after a quick swallow following the last setback. “Two …”
“Okay, put down the shooter,” mouthed Grey Raincoat.
“You going to spill?”
“Better. I’ll take you to him.”
“Oh no. I want to know who and why.”
“Well, I don’t know who. Don’t know his name, that is. And I don’t know why. He just told me to follow you, watch you and make a report at the end of the week. That’s tomorrow.”
“What sort of report?”
“Usual. Who you’re kipping with. Where you go. What you do. Financial status. Habits. You got some bad habits, haven’t you mate?”
“Where’s his drum?”
“He told me to ask you round if you gave me any aggro.”
“Did he now? Okay. You go first, I’m right behind you.”
They went up the exit steps on the corner of Regent Street opposite the Regent Palace, walked up the street and hailed a cab.
Grey Raincoat asked for an address in Hans Place just behind Harrods. In the taxi Boysie sat slewed over in one corner still keeping the fictitious gun on the man. He could see him properly now. Weasel-faced with slightly protruding teeth, yet quite well set up.
The house was converted into two flats.
“He’s upstairs,” Grey Raincoat told Boysie.
The entrance hall was plain but cared for. The door to the upstairs flat gleamed white. It also looked very solid. Boysie told his prisoner to push the bell. It took a long minute before the footsteps sounded and the key turned.
The door opened to reveal a short man, neatly dressed in conservative grey. His tight curly hair was now more grizzled than Boysie remembered.
“Well, well. Look what the ever-changing sea of life’s washed up on me front doorstep. How are you, Boysie old laddie?” Mostyn grinned. It was the grin of a rat about to kill.
2
Six scavenging lizards rutted around in Boysie’s stomach. Moments of sheer terror were not unknown to him, but the fear that his former boss, Mostyn, always produced was unique.
“I might have known,” was all that Boysie could blurt.
“Come on, laddie. Only trying to help. You know your uncle Mostyn.” He stood there, confident, the oily self-satisfied smile lubricating his face.
“Sorry about this, sir, I lost him on the tube then he got the better of me,” said Grey Raincoat. “I should warn you he’s armed.”
Boysie felt better. He grinned, lifted his right hand and waggled his forefinger at Grey Raincoat. “Smith and Wesson Chiefs Special.”
“Jesus,” said Grey Raincoat.
“I warned you, Harold, Boysie boy’s full of cheerful surprises. If you’ve nothing else to tell me perhaps you’d jog along. Call me tomorrow eh?”
“As you like. And the name’s Albert.”
Mostyn motioned Boysie inside and closed the door firmly. “A political pauper,” he said, nodding to where Grey Raincoat had been left, blank-faced. “Real name’s Albert Wilson. Hates me calling him Harold. Come and have a drink.”
He led Boysie down the long hall and into a room decorated in warm shades of pink. It was a little chichi for Boysie but typical of sharp little, smooth little, and very professional little Mostyn.
“Sit down.” Mostyn motioned to a deep easy chair. “You still drink brandy?”
Boysie nodded. “Who is he?”
“Who?” Mostyn asked from a long bottle-scaped marble table.
“Harold. Albert. Wilson.”
“Well he’s not a government man.”
“You could tell that. He didn’t twitch. Look, this is bloody cheeky. You put him on to me, I’d like to know who he is and what game we are playing?”
Mostyn grinned his slippery grin and held out a large balloon glass containing a liberal quantity of the dark amber liquid.
“I don’t play games, Oaksie. After all these years you should know that. I instigate games but I don’t play them. Albert Wilson is an enquiry agent.”
“A private detective.”
“A good one.”
“He was no good as a tail. I had him cold.”
“Ah, but I trained you, didn’t I? Cheers. To absent friends.” Mostyn raised his glass. Boysie knew exactly who the absent friends were: the great army of dead whose lives had been forfeited during the multitude of games Colonel Mostyn had set in motion during his time as Second in Command of Special Security.
Boysie took a sip from the glass. The brandy caught his throat and exploded in a wall of flame against his guts. Spare cash had not been running to good brandy lately. The pain was exquisite.
“Why have me followed?” he asked once his breathing returned to normal and the tears were wiped from his eyes.
“Simply wanted to pick up old threads. Like to know if things have changed, especially when I’m considering making an offer to an old friend.”
“An offer?” Boysie thought about the last sentence. An offer from Mostyn to an old friend was rather like handing out dishes of hemlock at a birthday party. Boysie pushed his tongue hard into his cheek and waited for around sixty seconds. “You look jolly well. Sunburnt and all that. Been in foreign parts?”
“Pretty foreign, laddie. South Africa.”
“That must have been nice for you. You’d enjoy it out there. Suit your style. What were you at, hiring a labour force?”
Mostyn showed his teeth. “Enough lad,” he hissed. “You can cool the clever chat and listen to me.”
Boysie rose with what elegance he could muster. “I shall
be leaving now.”
“Sit down lad. I’ve got a proposition.”
“I’ve thought about it. Your propositions are murder. I’ve no desire to get mixed up in business motivated by you. Never again.”
“Sit down. I can help you. I also know far too much about you.”
Boysie sat. “You don’t change, do you?”
“For that you should be thankful. I well remember the day I walked into a dirty, stinking rotten third class café and offered you better things. You jumped at that. For all the bad moments you did discover that life could be pleasant without financial troubles.”
“I can manage.”
“After a fashion. You’re not getting any younger, Boysie, and I can offer you a certain security.”
“When you start checking up on someone and making propositions it means the job’s dirty and, if necessary, you’ll resort to blackmail as they used to say in B movies.”
“If you’ll just listen …’
“Hopeless …”
“I’ve found a licence to print money …”
“Ah.” Boysie was hooked for a second. “No. No, I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to get myself invol
ved.”
“Airlines.”
“I don’t hear you.”
“Airlines carry people to and from places and they charge high prices.”
“A lot of wind for this time of the year.”
“What if I told you I’ve discovered a way to run an airline and make a profit by only charging half the normal fares?”
“It’s against the law. They have rules to stop people doing that kind of thing. It’s lawless. Unruly. Irresponsible. It’s shifty.”
“Quite. It shifts people in bulk from place to place. I have the capital.”
“I dare say. You’re well connected.”
“Not my money, lad, you don’t think I’d use my own money for a business venture?”
“Who’s the sucker?”
“No sucker. Part of it was his idea. What if I tell you the Chief put up the bread.”
“The Chief?” It was unthinkable. By the Chief, Mostyn meant the former Chief of Special Security, an elderly retired Admiral with a line of invective which could stop a flame-thrower, and an unquenchable thirst for Chivas Regal. As Chief of Special Security he had proved outstandingly incompetent: hence Mostyn’s tremendous power in the Department before its discontinuance.
“Surprise you?” Mostyn leaned back in his chair, master of nearly all he surveyed.
“I suppose he’s senile now.”
“Far from it. Spends most of his time agitating against our masters.”
Boysie still could not see it. The Chief and Mostyn were both, in his mind, synonymous with the Establishment. “What’s the deal?” he asked, interested only in details.
Mostyn sipped his brandy. “We would run a nice comfortable airline.” The voice was almost hypnotic. “A super office somewhere in the heart of London. Nice young girls to do your bidding, deal with the office chores, and double as ground hostesses when needed. Piped music, the best Musak can provide …”
“Cut the commercial. How does it work?”
“Like a super travel agency only we call ourselves an air company. We find enough people who want to go to a particular part of the globe for a more reasonable fee than they would have to pay a regular airline. We then charter an aeroplane for them as a group. Take them to the aircraft on the appointed day and wave them goodbye.”
“And what would I do?” It was too easy. There had to be something.
“You would mind the store.”
“And that would entail?”
“Hiring and firing of dollies. Advertising. Acting as go-between with the air charter company. Booking the ladies and gentlemen on their flights, and seeing that they all get aboard safely. You would also be required to wine and dine some people of influence when I’m not doing that. Oh, and you would be a director of the company.”
“The fall guy. The patsy. What’s wrong with all this, Mostyn? There must be a catch.”
Mostyn smiled. A snake at rest.
“It’s illegal, isn’t it, for a start?”
“Yes. You could say that. But I would put it another way. It’s illegal if you get caught and if they can prove anything. We would operate as a perfectly legitimate company.”
“But it’s a fiddle.”
“A Stradivarius. You’d be very happy with us.”
“Just a brace of questions.” Boysie had a fair idea of what the job was now. Many years ago he had learned to read the strange and cryptic language spoken by Mostyn. When Mostyn smoothly offered you something that looked like a doddle it was invariably dangerous.
“Interrogate, dear boy. Interrogate, examine, be my inquisitor.”
“These aircraft that are going to be magic carpets for the clients?”
“Yes?”
“Would I be expected to travel on them?”
“Under normal circumstances, no.”
“And abnormal circumstances?”
Mostyn gave the matter five seconds’ thought. “In the unlikely event, you might, just might, be asked to take a short trip.”
Boysie nodded, narrowing his eyes in understanding. Mostyn knew that one of his pet hatreds was flying. “And what,” he asked, “would be my magnificent salary?”
Mostyn chuckled, leaned forward and patted Boysie’s knee in a knowing sort of way, then rose and stood by his chair looking at Boysie after the manner of a horse dealer.
“I suppose we’d have to kit you out first. You have got a shade rat-eaten, haven’t you, laddie.”
“Well?”
“Five hundred for clothes and grooming. Then, fifty quid a week after tax.”
Boysie nodded. “No,” he said loudly.
“You haven’t got a driving licence for hard bargains, Oaksie. Tell you what; why don’t you finish up your brandy, go home and think about it? Call me on Monday. My card.” He held out the small oblong pasteboard which Boysie took and stuffed into his breast pocket.
“It’s no good, Mostyn. You took a great hunk out of my life once before and made it agony. I’m not travelling your way again.”
“It’s the only way you’ll ever travel first class. You want to remember that.”
“I’ll manage.”
“At your age? And with your experience?”
Boysie did not want to think about it so he shut Mostyn’s words away into the sealed section of his mind.
*
The electricity company sent a nice combined greetings and bill which arrived on the next morning. It was printed in red and informed Boysie that they would cut off the electricity if he did not settle the account within seven days.
The gas company sent a similar message by the lunchtime mail. There was also an odd assortment of incidental bills.
Boysie began to perform simple feats of mathematics which did not call for the eloquence of an abacus nor the complexities of a computer.
By Saturday he was making some attempt to face up to reality. His financial float had taken nearly all the punishment it could stand. The hard cash was running out. It was only a matter of time before some other form of income would have to be found.
On that Saturday evening Boysie took a deep breath and plunged out into the streets, heading for the West End. Oxford Street seemed more of a disaster than he remembered it: garish, cheap and plastic while the people had a brittle cold look about them as well. He trudged down Regent Street into Piccadilly which was equally smudged with despair. There was the sense of being near to something desperate, on the corner of apathy: the lethargy that touches a man trapped in intense cold and brings him into the freezing sleep.
The faces floated past Boysie, either set and belligerent or pleading. Perhaps, he thought, it was himself: a shabbiness that had pervaded his own life for too long. Something had to be done about that for a start.
On the following afternoon he sat down to really think things out. Behind the present greyness there must be another kind of life. That was indisputable because once he had nearly touched it. Not a soft cloying and destructive luxury, but a way of life that paid off in self-respect.
His mind kept floating back to Mostyn’s offer. There was a definite attraction. Money. But his old boss was not opening the doors to the past: leading him back to the strange under-cover world they had once both inhabited. This, Boysie told himself, was different. This was the world of big business. The Power Game. The Money Market.
Sitting by the window, dreaming as he looked down into the Earl’s Court Road and across to Newsagent S. W. Wood Tobacconist, it was quite simple to propel himself through the glossy looking glass and the magazines of smooth and soothing texture. The office with its leather-buttoned chairs, the long desk, trim phones, trim secretary, a massive abstract on the wall and work flicked off with the nerveless assurance of a master tycoon.
The BAC contract, Stephanie?
Yes, Mr Oakes, ready in five minutes.
It’d better be, I have to catch the noon flight to New York for the meeting with Howard Hughes.
“Mr Midas,” he muttered to himself. “Whizz Kid Operator Cleans
Out The Market.”
Across the road Newsagent S. W. Wood Tobacconist stood where it always stood. A brace of sheepskin rugs, topped with straggling long hair, plodded past, and a delicately poised young woman walked purposefully, tight white boots peeping from below her scarlet maxi coat as the traffic thickened, scenting the air with its particular pollution.
He turned from the window and switched on the eternal telly. A long-haired young man was being tedious and boring, telling four smooth prune-faced gentlemen that the stinking dirty capitalist society was tedious and boring and that he for one was not going to work for anyone ever again and there were thousands like him who would eventually bring the country to its knees. Two of the smooth prune-faced gents nodded rhythmically showing that they understood and sympathised. The other pair smiled superciliously.
Nobody, thought Boysie, bothered to point out that the long-haired young man was probably right and in about thirty years he would inherit the society of his choice. But by then youth would once more be having its fling.
On Monday, Boysie called Mostyn.
“I thought you’d see sense,” said Mostyn.
“I haven’t seen sense. But I want to talk with you. I need to know more.”
“That means you’re interested, lad. If you’re interested you’ll take the final step and join us. Come round and I’ll disclose all.”
Half an hour later, Boysie was sitting in Mostyn’s lair clutching a glass of brandy.
“Well?” asked Boysie.
“My offer still stands. Plus a nice bonus.” Mostyn smiled silkily.
“I simply want details. I haven’t made a decision yet.”
“Come on, Oaksie. You can’t pick and choose. You’re not a blunt instrument. You’re not jolly James Bond.”
“Neither was he.”
Mostyn flashed his stiletto look and grunted. “You want to hear it?”
“As it is, without the frills and cons,” said Boysie with a force that surprised even him.
Mostyn relaxed and stared into his glass. “Let’s put it like this. To switch on to this scene you’ve got to understand the basic principles.”
“Such as?”
“Such as we have everything set up to open a company under the brilliantly descriptive name AIR APPARENT.”
