Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  Some of the smaller boys, their bellies replete, would leave the chop house to crawl back into their squalid quarters and sleep until noon in a bed of dirty rags. Those who had money or friends who would share what they’d won would stay to grow drunk on a pint of gin or brandy.

  During the progress of one night Ikey might be seen, his hands working in the gestures of unctuous trading, in the reeking hubbub of Rosemary Lane doing business among the festoons of second-hand clothes. Or if the tide was in and to run before dawn, he might be seen working his way to the river to the regions of Jacob’s Island and those parts known as the Venice of Drains in Bermondsey, which he reached by traversing the impenetrable alleys, dives and runways round Leicester Square and the Haymarket, this part of the great rookery being the convenient asylum for the thieves, flash-men, touts and prostitutes working the rich fields of the West End. Here could be found the rakish members of the upper classes with their courtesans, their ears and necks and decolletage awash with diamonds and pearls, the starched young swells, toffs and codgers on the randy, the gamblers and cashed-up jockeys and the furtive old perverts from the privileged classes who mixed vicariously with the low-life. This place, too, was an essential nightly visitation for a fence of Ikey’s status in the underworld.

  Ikey could come upon these places from Whitechapel or Spitalfields along dark, fetid lanes, and through vile netherkens crowded to suffocation with thieves and beggars and the desperate, starving poor sleeping and copulating on straw-filled billets and bundles of rags.

  Sometimes he moved along well-established paths formed over rooftops or through cellars and dark alleys, sliding past the stagnant open gutters which ran down the centre of these narrow filth-choked runways. Even in the dark he knew the whereabouts of the numerous cesspools which would trap many a gin-soaked hag, or drunkard who’d lost his way and having slipped on the surrounding excrement could not regain a foothold and would be sucked into the shit to drown.

  Ikey knew with intimacy this great rookery of St Giles and many others, and was as much at home in them as the rats scurrying ahead of him along the soot-stained walls. He could reach the destination of his choosing without once crossing an honest thoroughfare or appearing within the light of a single street lamp, seen along the way only by the incurious eyes of beggars, thieves, night-stand prostitutes, petty touts, sharpers and the broken and desperate humanity who lived in these festering parts. Those who saw nothing unless they were paid to do so and who, upon being questioned by a magistrates’ runner, knew nothing of a person’s whereabouts, even if they had glimpsed them, bold as brass, not a moment beforehand.

  On a rising tide Ikey might be seen furtively moving close to a wall or along a pier in the dock areas before disappearing below the malodorous deck of a boat. Before dawn’s light it would slip its moorings and on the morning tide move silently down the river, its progress concealed by the sulphurous mist and smog that sat upon the Thames.

  By sunrise this vessel, which outwardly carried hemp or tiles or any of the other miscellanea which made up the maritime drudgery of commerce between England and the continental ports, would be safely into the Channel. It carried about Ikey’s consignments of stolen jewellery to be reworked in Amsterdam and Antwerp; parcels of Bank of England notes in every denomination to be laundered in Hamburg and Prague banks; silver and gold bound for Bohemia and Poland to be sold or melted down in the shops and workshops of various foreign Jews.

  Ikey would arrive at Egyptian Mary’s not a minute beyond five in the morning. He would greet Mary upon his return from the foulness of his peripatetic night and before anything else he would look at the house takings, always wheedling and quarrelling, as if the bitter bargaining of the night must be run down and unwound before he could be brought to a state of calm.

  He would carp at the cost of a haunch of ham, or measure the level of the claret cask, as much to bring himself to an emotional repose as to attempt to gain more than his fair share of the night’s profit. Thereafter he would unload the takings of his fencing business for that night, valuing each item expertly and suggesting what might become of them; a melting or resetting or re-cutting, what could be disposed of in London, what must needs be sent abroad.

  Mary entered all this into her receivals ledger. Ikey also acquainted her of the whereabouts of heavier merchandise: bolts of cloth, linen and brocade, a handsome pair of Louis XIV chairs or a valuable tapestry. Mary would arrange to have these picked up and delivered at a time when they would arrive unobserved. In this last regard she would often use Bob Marley, the slash man, whom she trusted and who proved to be a careful and reliable go-between.

  Ikey had a passion for order in his affairs and this had made him extremely rich. When this final task for the night was completed, Mary would place the books in a secret place, this task always overseen by Ikey. Then, at last, often just before dawn, they would pause to share a glass of chilled champagne in her little private parlour at the rear of the establishment.

  This was the happiest time of Ikey’s life and he composed an epigram which he would pronounce to Mary and which encapsulated the satisfaction he took from being the joint proprietor of Egyptian Mary’s. Holding his glass of champagne to the light and watching the tiny beaded bubbles rise in straight and orderly lines to the surface he would announce, ‘My dear, I ‘ave a theory fantastic for the success of our enterprise. Shall I say it for you?’

  ‘You certainly may, sir! You certainly may!’ Mary would rise and top up his glass and then do the same to her own, whereupon she would seat herself again holding her glass and wait. Ikey would lower his glass and take a polite sip of champagne, then in a preacherlike manner, intone:

  If the angle of the dangle

  is equal to the heat of the meat,

  then the price of the rise,

  is decided by the art of the tart.

  ‘There it be, my dear, the entire business of brothel keepin’ contained in a simple rhyme.’

  Simple as he claimed it to be, Ikey thought it exceedingly clever and never tired of the reciting of it. At the conclusion of the rhyme they would clink glasses and entwine arms, each taking a sip of champagne, whereupon Mary would say, ‘May our bubbles keep risin’. Amen!’

  It was as close as the two of them ever came to sentimentality of the kind which might be described as love.

  For Mary the bawdy house on Bell Alley was a daily confirmation that she could be a woman of enterprise and that by her own wit and skill she could gain a security in life she had never known. Ikey was proving to be her way out of poverty, misery and an almost certain slow crippling death from syphilis, or a quicker one at the hands of some madman with a shiv in need of the means for an opium pipe. There were a thousand ways a prostitute could meet her death, but very few ways in which she could expect to remain alive much beyond her mid-twenties.

  In gratitude Mary showed Ikey more tolerance than ill temper. She was often sorely tempted to screw his scrawny neck, but for the most part refrained from violence, boxing his ears only when provoked to the extreme. She knew him to be a coward, a cheat, a liar and, of course, a notorious thief, though this last characteristic she regarded simply as Ikey’s profession.

  Without the thief there would be no magistrate or judge or lawyer or half the regular clientele of her bawdy house. And so she had no reason to place Ikey’s choice of vocation in any poorer light than that of her clients. When the poor embrace the tenets of morality it comes ready-made with misery as its constant companion. Mary counted herself fortunate to have Ikey in her life and very occasionally in her bed, which was as close as anyone had ever come to loving him, or she to feeling affection for any other person since her mother and father died.

  But it is not in the nature of things to remain calm. Contentment is always a summer to be counted in brief snatches of sunlight, while unhappiness is an endless winter season of dark and stormy weather. The cold wind of Ikey’s and Mary’s discontent was beginning to howl through the rat-infested r
ookeries, sniffing at the mud and shit of the dark alleys and stirring the slime of the river into a foment of disaster which was about to wash over them both.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At the end of a miserable night in December with the wind roaring and the snow swirling, Ikey was just turning into Bell Alley from Winfield Street when a figure leapt from the shadows directly into his path. Ikey jumped in fright as the dark shape presented itself through a sudden flurry of snow.

  ‘It be friend!’ Bob Marley shouted into the driving wind. ‘A word is needed in yer ear, Ikey, an urgent word!’

  Ikey relaxed. Bob Marley was to be trusted. As a young ‘un he’d been a chimney sweep whom Ikey had plucked from his miserable trade to work for him as a snakesman. He recalled how he hadn’t cheated the boy particularly and so had no reason to fear him. He was a likely lad in his day who seemed to be double jointed in all his connected parts, and could squirm and slide through apertures too small for a dock rat to enter. While he had remained small Ikey had profited well from his talent for entering property.

  As a boy Marley had been intelligent and naturally cunning and would have made a good leader if he had not always been a loner. Though it was this very characteristic which meant he could be trusted not to open his gob or boast of his conquests to the other street urchins. With money in his purse for frequent visits to a chop house, the pocket-sized lad had grown quickly and was soon too big to be a snakesman. Ikey had trained him as a pickpocket but he never amounted to greatness for he refused to work in a team. He’d grown into a villain, dangerous if crossed, but known to work only for himself and only for gold. In the terms of the times and the kind with whom Ikey naturally mixed, Bob Marley was reliable as a new-minted sovereign. Ikey stepped deeper into the alley where the noise of the wind was less intense.

  ‘I ‘ave information important to ya, Ikey, most important, most important indeed! Yes! If I say so meself, information o’ the kind a person doesn’t come upon every day.’ Marley paused and then added in an ominous voice, ‘Thank Gawd!’

  Ikey removed his hands from the pockets of his great coat and slipped off the filthy fur-lined glove of his right hand, then he re-entered the coat through an entirely different part of its anatomy and opened his dumby secretly. He allowed his fingers to slip through the coins in the leather purse until he sensed the warmer touch of a gold sovereign, whereupon his nimble fingers worked until they touched six sovereigns which he carefully pushed to one corner of the purse, then he took three. These he produced held between thumb and forefinger as though they were a single coin conjured from the air. He had already gauged the worth of Marley’s information, which he’d set in his mind at six gold sovereigns. He knew from the tone of his informer’s voice that the information was kosher. He’d think less of Marley if he didn’t manage to extract another three sovereigns from him for its deliverance. He held the three gold coins out to the man in front of him.

  ‘Three sov? Three bleedin’ sov!’ Marley removed the scarf that covered all but his eyes, looked at Ikey in disgust and then spat onto the snow at his feet. ‘This ain’t no bleedin’ social call!’

  But Ikey held the gold sovereigns in front of Marley until his fingers began to tingle with the cold and finally Marley, shrugging his shoulders, removed the woollen mitten from one hand and took them without a word, testing their weight in the palm of his hand before biting each in turn with a gold eye tooth. He grunted and placed them into his vest-pocket. Though he’d hoped for more, he’d been standing around in the bitter night for more than an hour, and he needed a large steak with relish and a pint of hot gin or he was sure he would perish from the cold.

  ‘You’ve been shopped!’ Marley said finally.

  ‘Who done it?’ Ikey asked.

  ‘It come up from Rosemary Lane. No names. Just a good friend what’s got an ear connected.’

  ‘When?’ Ikey asked.

  ‘Termorra, early mornin’, sparrow fart!’ Marley paused, then added, ‘After all the toffs ‘ave scarpered from yer ‘ouse of ill repute!’

  ‘This mornin’! Oh Jesus! Oh me Gawd! Oh shit! This mornin’? This very mornin'?’

  Bob Marley nodded and dug into the interior of his coat to produce a gold hunter at the end of a brass chain. Clicking it open, he examined its face.

  ‘I’d say ‘bout three ‘ours, tosh!’ He closed the lid of the watch with a flick of his thumb. ‘Reckon they gotcha this time, me lovely!’

  ‘Where?’ Ikey asked tremulously. It was an important question, for if it was the house he and his wife Hannah shared he would be less concerned. The house in White-chapel had been raided several times, but the trapdoor under Hannah’s bed, which led to a large false ceiling in which his stolen property was stored, was so cunningly contrived as to be invisible to the naked eye. But the house at the end of the alley in which he stood was less well accommodated to the concealment of stolen goods. A raid on Mary’s bawdy house, even if he could clear it of contraband in time, which hardly seemed possible, would be a disaster. Its basement contained the heavy mechanicals of the printing press which had been brought in, one piece at a time, over several months, to make up a press of a very peculiar kind, and such as would be of great interest to the law if examined with the printing of banknotes in mind. There could be no thought of its removal, which would take several days.

  Bob Marley’s hand went out and he rubbed his forefinger and thumb together. Ikey returned to the interior of the great coat and produced another gold sovereign. Marley pocketed it and simply jerked his thumb down towards the interior of Bell Alley. ‘Right ‘ere, me lovely.’

  It was not possible for Ikey’s sallow skin to grow more pale. ‘ ’Ere? Oh me Gawd! Not ‘ere, not tomorrow!’ He looked up at Marley in despair. ‘Who? Who will it be?’ Ikey produced a gold coin without Marley encouraging him.

  Bob Marley took it with a grin. He’d hoped for five sov and he’d got it. He was not to know that Ikey had reserved another but, given the nature of the news, would have paid five times as much for his information.

  ‘Is it a question of feeing the officers, my dear?’ Ikey’s lips trembled as he asked. ‘ ’Ave they sent you? Is that why you’ve come? Do we ‘ave any time? No, o’ course not, no time, no time whatsoever and at all!’

  Bob Marley shook his head slowly and replaced the woollen mitten, rubbing his hands together to restore the circulation in his recently exposed limb.

  ‘No set up, Ikey. City!’

  ‘City!’ Ikey howled. ‘Oh Gawd, oh mercy, oh no!’

  ‘ ’Fraid so, me lovely, it’s them machines you got in the basement what’s got you in this awful predictament!’

  Ikey drew back alarmed. ‘What’s you know about that then?’

  Marley chuckled. ‘It’s me business to know fings, ain’t it? Just like I knows it’s City what’s comin’ after yer!’

  The single word ‘City’ had struck mortal terror into Ikey’s heart. ‘City’ was simply another word for the Bank of England. For the private police force they ran who were said to be as remorseless as a pack of bloodhounds when they set upon a case.

  Ikey’s worst nightmare was taking place. He had been tempted into dealing with queer screens, the making of forged Bank of England notes, knowing it to be the most dangerous criminal vocation of them all. It was also as good a business as a villain could think about, providing you had the capital and the skill to set it up and the courage and wit not to be caught.

  Forged English notes were laundered in Europe, mostly in Russia, Poland and Bohemia, where frequent enough commercial travel took place from England through the Hanseatic Ports. These countries, unlike France, Holland, Austria and Italy, were not sufficiently traversed for the smaller banks to be totally familiar with the larger denominations of English notes, so that a good forgery would more easily deceive their bank officials.

  Ikey was making an enormous profit all round, paying for the European remodelling work on stolen jewellery with forged long-tails, this being
a splendid way to launder the counterfeit English banknotes. It was also why he allowed Mary to chastise him for being cheated in his overseas transactions. Ikey was cleaning up at both ends.

  Forgery was nevertheless an exceedingly dangerous endeavour. Ikey knew that no feeing or bribing of a Bank of England officer was possible and that once on his tail, the City police would not give up until they had him safely in the dock at the Old Bailey or, better still, posted for a hanging and locked in a condemned man’s cell at Newgate.

  Ikey had broken the first rule of a good fence, this being that a criminal endeavour in which bribery is not possible is the most dangerous of all possible pursuits and not, under any circumstances, to be undertaken. Ikey was not given to self-recrimination but now he castigated himself for the fool he had been. There were fine pickings elsewhere and he was already a rich man. Forgery carried the death penalty and no crime under English law was considered more heinous, for it attacked the very basis of property, the oak heart of the English upper classes.

  Ikey mumbled his thanks to Bob Marley, who had started to move away.

  ‘It’s nuffink, me pleasure,’ Marley called back laughing. ‘I’ll visit you in Newgate, me lovely, bring ya summink tasty, wotcha say then, jellied eels?’

  ‘ ’Ave you told Mistress Mary?’ Ikey shouted at the retreating Marley.

  ‘Nah!’ His dark shape disappeared into Winfield Street.

  Ikey waited a few moments before he too traced his steps out of the alley back into the gusting snow storm. In less than fifteen minutes he’d arrived at the netherken where his boys slept. Here he found two likely lads and sent them to Covent Garden to borrow a coster’s cart narrow enough to move down the alley. Ikey arranged to meet the two boys at the Bell Alley brothel half an hour hence.