Gordon he accepted as a small-time con artist, rather on his own level, though less prosperous. ‘Though you’ve got a touch of class in the voice,’ he once said, flatteringly. ‘You could sell encyclopædias, you could.’
‘The best cons,’ Snobby would say expansively over a drink, especially if Gordon bought it for him, ‘are the simple cons. Look at the South Sea Bubble. Learnt about that at school—always stayed with me. Simple, effective, beautiful!’
Gordon nodded wisely. He was never quite sure when Snobby was being humorous. Snobby had a sense of humour, where Gordon had very little.
‘The other thing about your simple con is, it’s them that clean up the biggest,’ Snobby went on. ‘Take the bloke that thought up the wheeze that Venice is sinking. Brilliant. He must have pulled in millions over the years.’
‘You’re not suggesting Lord Norwich—’
‘Whoever he was. Some smart little Mafia con I’d’ve thought. A real little beauty. Because bleedin’ Venice isn’t sinking, any more than Southend is. All high and dry and dandy. Mind you the bloke who thought of building it there in the first place was something of an artist too. Did you ever see a more obvious tourist trap? A man ahead of his time he must have been.’
Snobby winked. Quite unprompted by Gordon, the conversation had begun to take a turn he liked.
‘You seem taken with Venice,’ he said casually.
‘Oh, I was. Lovely little place. Only drawback that I could see was you couldn’t do a good snatch there, because the getaway presents problems.’
‘Been there often?’
‘Just the once. A church conference.’
Gordon’s heart rose.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of you as a Christian.’
Snobby laughed.
‘That’s why I was there, though. The Fourth Ecumenical Conference. You know: Catholic and C. of E. clergymen holding hands in gondolas. That was a right occasion. Tell you about it some day.’
He didn’t, though, not over the next two evenings spent chewing over the great cons, past and present. In the end Gordon had the brainwave of bringing the conversation round to clergymen.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, with the air of long and disreputable experience, ‘but I never found there was much to be got out of the clergy. They’re supposed to be so bloody other-worldly, but somehow there’s never anything much to be got there. Maybe they’re too hard up.’
Snobby’s face assumed a relishing smile.
‘True. Most of them are that. Church of England, anyhow.’ He leaned forward confidingly. ‘But I’ll tell you this, me boy: there’s money to be got not from the Church, but by the Church. That’s for sure.’
‘What do you mean? Collection boxes, appeals, that kind of thing?’ asked Gordon innocently.
‘No, I do not mean that at all. Let me put it to you like this: if a man wants to lead a comfortable life, and enjoys tacking over to the windy side of the law, what better trade to enter than the Church? And here I’m talking about the Catholic Church, me boy. Very comfortable life, especially the higher you go. The celibacy rule doesn’t bother you, because you’ve no intention of abiding by it. And as a way into the criminal life it has one great, glorious advantage.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Who hears most secrets? A bank manager? A politician? A social worker? No—it’s a priest.’
Gordon’s heart almost stopped beating.
‘My God—you don’t mean—?’
‘Right. The confessional. That’s where the really interesting secrets are poured out.’ Snobby grinned. ‘I can see you’re shocked, laddie. Supposed to be secret, isn’t it? But think of it like this: there’s this man—I have one in mind, but don’t think you’ll ever learn who—who goes into the Church purely and simply for what he can get out of it. Purely, simply and solely. Not an ounce of religious feeling in his whole make-up. He likes the good things of life, and this is his way of getting them—and a nice little bit of power to boot. From the beginning he knows that one of his ways will be using the confessional. I tell you, it’s the most brilliant wheeze I ever knew.’
‘You mean—blackmail?’ Gordon stuttered.
‘ ’Course I mean blackmail. Used very, very discriminatingly. Which means it’s a slow starter. When you’re parish priest of Little Wittering-on-the-Wallop you don’t try to blackmail Mary Sykes because she’s sleeping with the local publican. Oh no—you take it slowly, get the notice of your superiors, emphasize that for you it’s the urban parishes that present the real challenges to Christianity in the modern world, take up all the fashionable causes—famine, apartheid, battered wives. And little by little you get to the sort of parish, the sort of position, where you’ve got the real villains, and the people with things in their lives that are worth hiding.’
‘Say London,’ said Gordon.
‘Say London,’ agreed Snobby, ‘though you needn’t think you’re going to get any more out of me than that.’
‘But what’s the point? What’s all the blackmail money going to be spent on?’
‘High living, indulged in very discreetly, and in out-of-the-way places: the Azores, Curaçao, the Æolian islands.’
Again there was that tiny click, as something fell into place. Somewhere in his notes there was a reference to a ‘tiny community’ of religious brothers in the Azores, to which Bishop Bannerman had often gone in retreat. Also to periods of solitary prayer, on Lipari . . .
‘What was your “in” on all this?’ Gordon asked, in his con-man-of-the-world manner. ‘How do you come to know so much about it?’
‘Oh, I was the collector. I wasn’t one of the faith—that wouldn’t have done at all—but he’d got something on me, never mind what, from someone who was. I collected the dibs, handed it over intact, and collected my percentage. Miserable little percentage it was too, but it all added up. No, it was a beautiful scheme, and I was proud of my part in it—profitable and risk-free. Or so I thought.’
‘Not?’
‘Well, my part was safe enough. You don’t catch me taking any risks in a simple matter of picking up a parcel of ten-pound notes. Piece of cake, as I’m sure you know. On the other hand, the Bish—my religious friend—well, I’m afraid he overplayed his hand.’
‘Went for the really big villains?’
‘Something like that, though not quite in the way you mean. Now, in this bloke’s parish—we’ll call it a parish—there were all sorts of villains, big, medium and small, from pimps to company directors, but naturally among the ones he knew best were the Mafia mob.’
‘Of course. But would they come to Confession?’
‘Some of ’em. Very devout little shysters, some of ’em. So he’d hear all about the rackets involving the Iti restaurants, the fruit and veg markets, not to mention some of the fall-out from the Calvi affair, and the Banco Ambrosi-how’s-yer-father. All very intriguing and profitable. And in among the rest, another little tit-bit. What that was precisely, I don’t claim to know. Mostly I never did know. But the Mafia guy he got it from was a hard little pimp in Hackney, and I’d guess he’d been a hard little pimp in Palermo before that, so whatever it was, it was probably sexual. If it’d been something bigger he might have twigged . . .’
‘So there was an Italian connection, was there? Hence Venice.’
‘Oh, there was an Italian connection all right. Though of course at Venice, at this ’ere conference I attended in an unofficial capacity, there were holy-rollers from all over, as well as C. of E., Methodists, Baptists, everything except the Reverend Ian Paisley, all making out they were matey as hell and brothers in Christ. It was all very affecting, if you didn’t listen to what they was saying behind each other’s backs. O’ course, I was just there on a package tour—’
‘To collect the loot.’
‘That’s it. The trouble was, in Italy I was a bit of a fish out of water.’ Snobby shook his head. ‘Or so the B—so my reverend bloke thought. He ma
de a plan for picking up the loot, made it himself, and I was too bleeding ignorant to argue against it. If I’d known about gondoliers . . .’
‘Gondoliers?’
‘I mean, all I knew about was honeymoon couples steered through the canals by a bloke with a pole who needed a shave and sang ‘O Sole mio’. I didn’t know they were the biggest pimps and petty crooks in the business, and had been going back centuries, ever since they built that place on stilts.’
‘I suppose it was asking for a double-cross.’
‘Too right it was. Added to the fact that Mario, the punter my bloke employed, had a mother from Messina, and contacts with all the underworld characters in Venice and on the mainland, all the way down to sunny Sicily.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Everything. Every-bloody-thing. Oh, the Iti Bishop came along—’
‘Italian Bishop?’
‘That’s right. Him that my bloke had got the juicy little piece of information about, from the hard little crook in Hackney. He came along with his packet of ten-thousand-lira notes, and left it under the seat at the gondolier’s end, just as he’d been told to in the note, and as I’d arranged with this Mario. Then I took my romantic little trip round the back canals, feeling a right berk, since I hadn’t got anyone to hold ’ands with, not even a gay vicar. And then we went out into the lagoon and I transferred the package to my little briefcase—all as ordered, though somehow I didn’t feel happy about it even then.’
‘I suppose you were followed when you got back to dry land?’
‘Must’ve been. And very cleverly too, because I know all the wheezes an English follerer will get up to. Naturally I didn’t go straight to my bloke and say “Here’s the loot”. I went up and down these dark little streets and alleyways, stopped for a cappuchino, stopped for a plate of spaghetti, though I got most of it down my shirt-front. Must’ve been pretty conspicuous, looking back on it, because I’m not the type to carry a briefcase. Eventually, as per arrangement, I went into this scruffy bar, went to make a phone call, and dropped the parcel. My bloke, in civvies, went in immediately after, and hey presto it went into his brief-case. Trouble was, I wasn’t followed any longer. He was. Then it was child’s play to find out which hotel room he was in, and who he was. So from then on his fate was sealed.’
‘His . . . fate?’
‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Mind you, he made it easier for them himself. He’d palled up with his victim, him who was Bishop of this big town in Sicily which shall be nameless. Oh, right palsy-walsy they were, swapping jokes in Latin and I don’t know what. Gave my bloke a good laugh, and that nice little feeling of power to boot—for as long as it lasted. He was in this Iti Bishop’s room when he died.’
‘When he had his heart attack?’
Snobby, well launched into his story, was oblivious to Gordon’s mistake: so far he had not mentioned any such thing as a heart attack.
‘Whatever you care to call it. Sharing a bottle of Corvo they was, a nice thick Sicilian red, in the Italian Bish’s hotel room. And what does he do, this Bish, when my bloke falls down and starts eating the carpet? Does he ring the hotel Reception and say “Get me the hotel doctor”? Oh no he does not. He rings a buddy-pal, practising in Venice, brought up in the same little village on the slopes of Mount Etna. No problems about a certificate from him. What’s the betting he was alerted in advance, eh?’
‘You’re not saying this bishop . . . murdered your man?’ said Gordon, aghast. Snobby sat back in his chair and looked at him pityingly.
‘You haven’t understood a word I’ve been saying, have you? That’s the whole point: they were two of a kind. They’d both gone into the Church for the same reason. That Bish was the Mafia’s spiritual arm back in their home island. Confessions heard daily and passed straight on. Once he knew that his blackmailer was a priest, he knew exactly how he’d got on to him, and exactly what to do.’ Snobby pushed his beer-mug away and felt for his scarf. ‘Which leads me to my final words of advice to you tonight: there’s no con so brilliant that two people can’t think it up. And if two people running the same con bump into each other—wait for the explosion.’
He pushed back his chair and got up, but as he did so he caught sight of Gordon’s troubled expression, and seemed as if he was seeing the real man for the first time. He sat down again and looked at him seriously.
‘It’s fair bowled you over, hasn’t it?’ he said. ‘You’re a serious chap at heart, aren’t you? Sympathetic too. People must talk to you, I shouldn’t mind betting. You ever thought of going in for the Church?’
THE OXFORD WAY OF DEATH
St Pothinus’s Hall is not one of the most distinguished colleges of the University of Oxford. Its academic record is frankly deplorable—a fact in which many of the dons take a twisted kind of pride. Nor is it one of the younger and livelier colleges. I myself, at forty-seven, am the second youngest of the Fellows. The vast majority are well into their sixties, or older. I once saw one of them reading over a list of the members of the Russian or Chinese politburo, with their ages, and chuckling so much he blew snuff all around the Senior Common Room. But compared to more normal institutions we are very old indeed. It has happened twice in the last year that a student would begin to read his weekly essay to a normally comatose old gentleman, only to find on concluding his piece that he had been reading for some time to a corpse. One of the young gentlemen to whom this happened let out a howl of horror and ran amok into Burton’s Quad, screaming and tearing his hair. The other retrieved his books from the floor around him, placed his essay back in its folder, and went and had a quiet word with Jenkyns the porter. His conduct was much approved.
On the evening this all starts, I sat at High Table and looked around at my fellow Fellows (that is the sort of joke they like), and thought what a pathetic lot they all were. Wrinkled, bald, shrivelled, having trouble with dentures, respiration and prostate glands. With some old people you can say, in effect: ‘Well, at least they’ve had a good life—’ or an interesting or exciting one. But the lives of these dons made A. E. Housman’s, by comparison, an existence jam-packed with incident. The Senior Common Room was still chuckling about a brief and unsuccessful fling our Mr Peddie (Divinity) had had with a lady don at St Anne’s. And that was back in 1934.
So anyway, there we all sat. Macnaughton, the Master, Peddie of the brief fling, Hugo Carmody (History), Pritchard-Jones (Medicine), Wittling (Classics) and the rest who play little part in this story, and who shall be left nameless. And myself, Peter Borthwick (English). Oh yes—and Auberon Smythe, the one who is younger than I. Auberon was elected in 1970, and at the interview he looked sober, discreet, well-washed. He came, we knew, from a minor public school, as we all did. When he arrived to take up residence six months later he had hair a foot long, wore kaftans, was into drugs, revolution and the gay scene, and used language that hadn’t been heard at High Table since the eighteenth century. We were properly conned. Twelve years or so had tamed him, as it had most of his generation, but he was still spoken of as our Big Mistake.
As we were spooning the last of the cabinet pudding into our mouths (St Pothinus’s is not renowned for its kitchen either), the Master launched himself, as was inevitable, into the subject of the next meeting of the Senior Common Room, to take place the following week. These little excitements in our lives cast long shadows before them.
‘A busy time is ahead of us, I fear,’ he began, in that disagreeable chainsaw voice of his which nevertheless had a certain authority, and ensured silence when he raised it above its normal whine. ‘And a long meeting too. For a start there is the question of Admissions for next year.’
All the old gentlemen around him sighed. If they had their way there would be no Admissions. No more undergraduates. They had a vague sense that two hundred years ago this would have been possible, and that they lived in a degenerate age.
‘No problem, surely, about Admissions,’ said Peddie, as the port began to go round. ‘They
all come up and take the scholarship exams, and then we give the places to the sons of Old Boys as usual.’
‘You forget,’ neighed the Master, ‘that the Old Boys are not producing many sons. Not enough.’
‘No. Hardly a philoprogenitive lot,’ said Wittling, with his horrid laugh like twenty French horns doing the prelude to Der Rosenkavalier.
‘We could always give the places to the best applicants,’ I said cautiously, for new ideas are not welcome at Potty’s.
‘I know what that means!’ yelped Peddie, wagging an accusing finger. ‘You want brains! Brains! Ha!’
‘Besides,’ said Pritchard-Jones seriously, ‘it would mean reading their scholarship papers.’
‘What are you talking about, EH?’ bellowed Hugo Carmody from the foot of the table.
‘Admissions,’ I shouted back.
‘Well, really!’ said Hugo Carmody with a knowing wink. He is quite infuriating. He was a friend of Waugh and Acton and people back in the ’twenties, but if he was a dog then, he certainly has had his day by now. He uses his deafness as a weapon, and when we shout at him he invariably seems to turn what we say in his mind into something indecent, making us feel like smutty schoolboys. To shut him up the Master proposed a toast.
‘Our benefactor, the poet-priest Heatherington,’ he neighed.
More priest than poet, more gentleman than priest, more bonviveur and hanger of poachers and discontented peasantry than gentleman. We drank the health of Edmund Heatherington (1711–1779), whose entry in the Oxford Companion to English Literature runs to one and a half lines. It was due to the happy accident of his having died immediately after writing the one will (of some thirty) which disinherited both his son and his daughter simultaneously that the college was rolling in money. We repeated his name in hushed tones, and sipped, reverently.
‘Then,’ said the Master, ‘there is the question of Elections.’
‘What are you talking about—EH?’ yelled Carmody again.
‘About ele . . . about appointing new Fellows,’ I shouted back.
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