Fiddle City

by Dan Kavanagh

  ‘How long do you have to wait?’

  ‘Oh, days, sometimes. The trouble is, you can’t take your eyes off them either. If you nod off you know what they’ll do.’ Duffy didn’t. ‘They shit it out and then swallow it again.’

  Duffy gulped, and gazed queasily at his chocolate éclair.

  ‘They do that?’

  ‘If it’s that or seven years, I reckon you might bite the bullet.’

  Duffy reckoned so too, though he didn’t care to give the choice very much thought.

  ‘It must be boring, all that waiting.’

  ‘Well, it is. If we were in Hong Kong or somewhere like that, we could give them Ex-Lax in their coffee and then Bob’s yer uncle. But not here – that’d be another assault, giving them the Ex-Lax. So we just have to wait, and we hold them as long as it takes. And then when they finally see they can’t leave without first being excused, it’s on with the rubber gloves, clothes-peg on the nose, and think of England.’

  ‘You sure there’s nothing in this coffee?’

  ‘Just a little persuader or two. You see, I want you to take these packages of fruit-gums out to Baghdad.’ Willett grinned. He rather fancied finishing off Duffy’s éclair for him. ‘Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the record for a sniffer is fifty-five. Includes back and front, of course. And the record for a swallower is 150. That’s one thing you won’t find in the Guinness Book.’

  Duffy grinned back at him. Willett was a nice old boy; well, not that old – fiftyish. His hair was thinner now than when they had first met, but he was still the same stocky, crease-faced, garrulous old bugger Duffy remembered. He had the face of your best friend’s favourite uncle – which was perhaps why he was such a good customs officer. You couldn’t lie to your friend’s favourite uncle: or if you did, you felt so guilty that it showed. Willett had been a senior officer since Duffy had first come across him in the line of business; and he’d been in the service long enough to still think of himself by the abandoned but cherished title of Waterguard.

  They were sitting over coffee in Terminal One’s Apple Tree Buffet. Behind Duffy’s back was the excuse for the name: a dead tree, fifteen feet high, decorated all over with red and green fairy balls. Above his head the main departure board occasionally rattled out the summonses of the afternoon; the same information was repeated here and there on pairs of television screens. Every thirty seconds or so an instruction boomed calmly over the public address, and teas were abandoned half-drunk. ‘Final call’ was a popular phrase in these parts: it rang in Duffy’s ears like a memento mori. He bet there were retired pilots who named their sunset bungalows ‘Final Call’.

  Only Willett’s presence prevented Duffy giving way to medium-grade paranoia. He hated airports. He hated planes too. Both, doubtless, because he hated Abroad. He didn’t hate foreigners – at least, not more than most people – but he did hate where they came from. Duffy had never been abroad, of course, but he knew without going that some form of craziness would be bound to strike over there. And so he hated everything that reminded him of the ease with which this dreadful fantasy could be made real. The sight of planes in the sky made him duck; a British Airways bus cruising harmlessly along the Cromwell Road filled him with anxiety. He didn’t even like meeting stewardesses – he felt in some obscure way that they might kidnap him, and he’d wake up gagged and bound in the cargo hold of a nose-diving DC-10. And that was another thing about planes: they crashed; they killed you. If Duffy were king, all aircraft would have painted along the side of the fuselage: ‘THIS PLANE CARRIES A GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING’.

  There was another thing about this place, this Heathrow. It was like being in a foreign city. People stopped being English here – even if they were English. They banged into you with cases and didn’t apologise. They pushed in front of you in queues. They shouted. They unashamedly expressed emotion at the departure gate. They were already competing with foreigners at being foreign. And all around there were these tiny Asian women in brown smocks: carrying trays, pushing mops, clearing ashtrays, walking gracefully in and out of the toilets. Most of them were so small they made Duffy feel full-sized; many of them struck him as quite old; they never spoke, except to each other, and then in a tongue from Abroad. The only thing that made you think it wasn’t Abroad were the signs everywhere and the unnervingly calm-voiced announcements on the public address. But even that didn’t mean you had to be in England. As a tiny Asian woman removed Duffy’s tray he realised what the place felt like: a thriving outpost of Empire, with an efficient local slave population.

  ‘What’s it about, Duffy?’ Willett was doing his avuncular look. That was O.K. by Duffy. He liked Willett. And in any case, customs officers didn’t count the same as stewardesses: after all, they were there – or so it felt to Duffy – to discourage people from going abroad, to make things nasty for them, vaguely to represent the disapproval of authority. Not at all like stewardesses.

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’m just sort of on the scout. I’ve got a job starting tomorrow in the cargo market. Bit of thieving. Don’t really know any more. Just thought I’d remind myself a bit of the place – and keep up with you, of course. I don’t have much call to come here normally.’

  Willett creased his face again; he knew about Duffy’s phobias.

  ‘Thieving’s not much of a surprise. After all, this is Fiddle City, Duffy.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I mean, the papers, and the judges, they call it Thiefrow, don’t they? But the thieving – that’s only a small part of it. It’s Fiddle City, Duffy, this place – Fiddle City.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘It’s true. What does Joe Public think? Joe Public thinks it’s all about smuggling, doesn’t he? He thinks this place is all about sneaking the extra bottle of duty free, or asking to see the receipt for your camera; and then occasionally there’s this great boogie comes hoofing it through the door, and there’s something about him that makes us think, bingo, he’s the one, and he has this big leather cap on his head, and we take it apart, and in the little button on the top we find a diamond, or a tab of L.S.D., or a microdot with the secrets of the atom bomb. That’s what Joe Public thinks, isn’t it? Joe Public’s a bloody muggins.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘It’s a city, Duffy, it’s a city.’ Willett was settling back and getting launched. ‘It’s as big as Newcastle, and the population changes every day. Think of it like that. So of course you get your smuggling, but that’s only the speciality of the place. You get all your other city crimes as well, and you get your sharper operators because they’re smart enough to see why it’s different from a normal city. It’s different because it’s very rich, because it’s open twenty-four hours of the day, and because lots of the people who are here are only thinking of getting home, and as long as they get home without losing too much, then that’s O.K.

  ‘There’s the smuggling, sure. Then there’s the thieving. Then there’s the armed robbery. Then there’s the pickpockets, and the forgers, and the pushers, and most of all the fiddlers. There’s so many fiddles, Duffy, you wouldn’t believe. You know what they say … ’

  ‘About the fresh fruit and veg? I heard it.’

  ‘Well, that’s one you’ve heard. You’ve probably heard about the cowboys at the cab rank too – three hundred quid to Birmingham and then drop you at the first motorway sign to Brum and let you walk.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Do you know the car park one?’ Willett felt competitive, needing to impress Duffy with a really good fiddle.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah. Car park.’ Willett waved a vague hand in the right direction. ‘Short-stay car parks, long-stay car parks. O.K.?’

  ‘O.K.’

  ‘Long-stay park much cheaper, but it’s a bit further away. You have to take the bus to the terminal. Dump your car, leave the keys, fill in a form saying when you’ll be back to collect it, fly off to the sunshine and the senoritas. What happens? Little car-hire firm springs up. N
o questions asked, and a lot cheaper than your Hertz or your Avis. Who’s going to remember the mileage on his car all the way through a lovely holiday? And if they do, well, you can always turn the clock back, can’t you?’

  ‘Sounds foolproof. Is it still working?’

  ‘No, silly cowboys had too many crashes. Got themselves closed down. As far as anyone can tell, of course.’

  ‘It’s a good fiddle,’ Duffy said admiringly.

  ‘First-class while it lasted. Pity they made a Horlicks of it.’

  Duffy nodded. He knew the feeling; it was common to all branches of law enforcement. After an initial period when you wanted to arrest everyone for everything – when every Troops-Out badge or half-flicked V-sign appeared to be Conduct Liable to Cause a Breach of the Peace – you settled into a realisation that you’d never catch everyone, you’d never clear up everything. You caught quite a lot of people because they were stupid, and you came to despise them for taking up a trade they were so ill-equipped for; you caught quite a lot of people because you were lucky; and you caught quite a lot of people because you worked very hard and wanted very much to catch them. Murderers, child molesters, that sort of thing – you hated them. But there were some crimes and some criminals you couldn’t help admiring, even liking. Crimes which had a lot of thought put into them, which were very well executed, and which hurt nobody – or virtually hurt nobody. You almost didn’t want to catch whoever was doing it because it gave you something close to pleasure: and if they then went and made a Horlicks of it, you felt irritated with them; as if, by letting you catch them, they’d somehow let you down.

  ‘How do you know who to search?’ It was a question everyone asked Willett sooner or later.

  ‘Trade secret. No, I’ll tell you. Mixture of science and nose, that’s what it is. And I mean literally nose sometimes. We’ve got one officer here, got a better nose than his dog. True, I swear it. We’ll be going over a cargo with a dog – the dog’s meant to sniff the cannabis, but this mate of mine often gets there first. Tells the dog where to sniff. Dog jumps up and down, wags his tail and gets another steak dinner. Amazing nose.’

  ‘But would you search me, for instance?’

  ‘Depends. Sometimes we get tip-offs, of course. Sometimes we take a little peek at the suitcases before they come up on the carousel – that helps us a bit. And we’ll watch you, often from the moment you get off the plane. Not you, necessarily, but some people. And don’t trust any mirror, by the way, don’t trust any mirror.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound as if you’d stop me.’

  ‘No, maybe we wouldn’t. But then every officer’s different. If you don’t have any information, then you’re down to your nose. There are two sorts of nose – what I call scientific nose, and what I call random nose. Scientific nose is when you look for guys who are nervous, or haven’t got what feels the right amount of luggage. Sometimes their case might come up first on the carousel – we can arrange these things – but they pretend not to notice it, and then only grab it when about half the other passengers have already taken theirs. Well, you’d turn him over. That’s what I call scientific nose.

  ‘Now random nose is different for everyone. For instance, I stop everyone with a raincoat slung over their left shoulder. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But you need some sort of random factor to operate on, if only to keep you on your toes yourself. I know officers who stop people wearing white suits; if you ask them to explain, they say it’s for really deep psychological reasons – they reckon the guy puts on the white suit to make other people think he’s pure and innocent and not trying to get away with something. Of course, often the guy’s got his white suit on because he doesn’t want to get it creased in his suitcase, or thinks it might get nicked, or wants to try and pick up a stewardess. But the officer thinks there’s more to it, or persuades himself that way, when really he’s just using random nose. It varies: some officers stop people who aren’t smiling, or who are smiling, or blond men, or bald men, or men who are with girls the officers fancy. That’s often just to get a longer look at the girl, or it may be jealousy after a hard night on the feet and getting the pip at seeing these swankies jetting in from L.A. I can’t say I blame them.’

  ‘Do you search the crews?’

  ‘Of course. That’s rummage – that’s what we call it. I was on rummage last week. We turned them upside down as usual. Didn’t find much – though it’s done to deter as much as to find stuff.’

  ‘Anyone you can’t search?’

  ‘Diplomatic bag. Though there are always ways.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Willett smiled.

  ‘Send in a ferret, of course.’ Duffy should have known better than to expect a straight answer. ‘No, but the short one is, Duffy, like I said before, this is Fiddle City. No one’s above the law, and a hell of a lot of people are below it.’

  Duffy didn’t like to speak his next thought, so instead he merely cocked an eyebrow towards his friend.

  ‘Cheeky sod.’

  Duffy recocked his eye.

  ‘Well since you ask, no, not in my experience. Not here. There was a bit of a rumble down at Gatwick a few years ago – the odd backhander was finding its way through from pilots of an airline we won’t mention. But here? Half of them are Scottish, which is a good start, and I say that as an Arsenal supporter. No. It’s much more than their job’s worth, you’d get a hell of a sentence, and it’d be very hard to pull off. Though sometimes I can see it happening: the haul of a lifetime – you might just be tempted. And if anyone was tempted, I’d blame Mrs Thatcher. No, really, I would.’

  ‘I always thought you were a Tory.’

  ‘Am. Voted for the lady. Don’t tell the wife,’ Willett looked conspiratorial, ‘but I fancy her a bit. All those nicely tailored suits. I’d let her through any day: she could come up my green channel and no questions asked. But – the lady did a terrible thing: she stopped the reward system. I’m sure it wasn’t Mrs T. herself, personally; but the next time the little civil servant who thought it was a good idea comes through here, he’s going to get the linings taken out of his suits and no mistake.’

  ‘You voting Tory again next time?’

  ‘Take more than that, Duffy. But you know, they talk about incentives – what incentive have we got now? Why do they stop anything that works, Duffy?’

  ‘That’s not my sort of question.’ They stood up together, and Duffy shook Willett’s hand. ‘I’ll maybe come and see you again in a week or two.’

  ‘Any time. Who knows, I may be round your shed for a rummage before you can say Jack Robinson.’

  ‘Well, you don’t know me if you do.’

  ‘Sure. Watch out for illegal golf clubs, Duffy. They’re sort of long and thin and made of metal and come in bags.’

  ‘I’ll keep my eyes skinned.’

  ‘Keep them skinned for the cowboys as well. I mean that. The cowboys round here aren’t any nicer than the cowboys anywhere else. Very short on morals, some of them.’

  ‘Got you.’

  And Duffy headed off through the raucous bazaar of this strange imperial city.

  Next day, before leaving for work, he rang Carol and asked her round that evening. She said she couldn’t make it; as always, the news gave him a stab. He didn’t ask; she didn’t explain; that was the deal. At one time she used to tell him when she was going to do things she knew he wouldn’t mind about – go to the pictures with a fellow-W.P.C.; or visit her aunt – but this only made him think that when she didn’t explain she must be going to the Ritz with Paul Newman, or making half a dozen pornographic films that evening. So they went back to the original system of her not saying, and his not asking. She’d come the following night instead.

  He guessed his clothes for Hendrick Freight: a denim jacket which looked as if it were made from separate patches but wasn’t (Duffy felt cheated when Carol had pointed out that it was done with false seaming); his oldest jeans, with authentic patches on the knees; desert boots. That should
do it.

  As he climbed into his van he reflected yet again how smart he’d been not to have it plastered with business slogans saying DUFFY SECURITY and pictures of red skulls and crossbones or whatever. Some firms worked like that: high visibility, they called it. He did, actually, have a board with DUFFY SECURITY painted on it: there were rubber suckers on the back and it could be stuck to the side of the van if he was going anywhere on official business. He’d originally had two such signs, one for each side of the van, but he lost one on a trip to Barking. He must have been producing a poor quality of spit that day.

  So: his clothes were O.K., the van was O.K. (that’s to say, it had started), the interview was rigged and so presumably would be O.K. (Hendrick had said the best story for Mrs Boseley would be that Duffy had done a lot of odd jobs around his house for him and was now looking for something permanent). He was driving along the M4 in the opposite direction to most of the commuter traffic, so that was O.K. The only thing which wasn’t O.K. was that he was going to have to keep tracking back to Heathrow every day and listen to the aircraft whining in pain, and watch them taking off at a ludicrously untenable angle, and it would be just his luck if one of them decided to stall into the freight area during the next few days.

  His was a rational unease. If you worked around airports and didn’t fret, you were the odd one, Duffy had long ago decided. Across to his left, a long slow morning line of jumbos was queuing up to land, sticking parallel to the M4. (It was obviously the only way they knew how to navigate. ‘Well, personally, I take the A205 through Mortlake … ’ ‘Oh, I’m much more of a North Circular man myself … ’ That was all the pilots ever talked about.) The planes kept a mile astern of one another, which was a criminally inadequate distance, as even Duffy could see. And they were flying so slowly – barely over-taking him. It was probably some competition to see who could go the slowest without stalling.