The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘What time did you leave the Central?’

  ‘Half past seven.’ Turning to Morris, Mahmood says sharply, ‘You got a warrant?’

  Morris ignores him and carries on searching through the pockets of the overcoat.

  ‘Which way did you come home?’

  ‘Past the baths.’

  ‘You alone at the cinema? See anyone you know?’

  ‘Yes. No.’

  ‘Have you been down Bute Street this evening?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You carry a knife, Mattan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We are going to search your room, Mattan.’

  ‘What for?’

  Morris pats the pockets of a jacket on the back of the chair and finds a broken razor.

  ‘I used to shave with it. It broke a long time ago.’

  ‘You have another razor?’

  Mahmood points to the dresser.

  Lavery removes the safety razor from a drawer and examines the blade. He puts it back without comment.

  ‘You have any money?’

  ‘No.’

  Morris holds out the few silver and bronze coins he’s found in the coat.

  ‘Where did you go after the cinema?’

  ‘I come straight home.’ Mahmood tenses up as Lavery and Morris paw through everything. ‘What are you looking for? Why you come to my room? You have no warrant.’

  ‘Don’t get cheeky, we don’t need a warrant, there’s been a serious incident in Bute Street tonight and a coloured man is believed responsible.’

  Mahmood scoffs. ‘Why a coloured man?’

  ‘You need to tell us the truth as to where you’ve been tonight, Mattan, this is more serious than your shoplifting.’

  ‘I don’t talk to you.’ Mahmood grabs his trousers, swirls the fabric straight and then rushes his legs inside.

  ‘A woman has been killed.’ Lavery looks him in the eye.

  ‘You lie. All police are liars.’

  ‘You better watch your loose tongue. I’m asking you again, where were you tonight?’

  ‘I don’t tell you anything.’

  Morris touches both pairs of shoes near the bed and rubs his fingers to feel for moisture.

  ‘If you hear anything, you come down to the station and talk to us, understood?’

  Mahmood stands guard near his door until they leave and then sits heavily on the bed. The calm of the night wrecked. What woman murdered? No end to the lies they tell to make a black man’s life hard.

  Hearing a commotion, he ventures back to the door and slips his head out. The upstairs Jamaican is wrestling with a uniformed policeman and getting the better of him. Lavery and Morris come hammering down the steps and enter the fray. Turning to Monday, who stands dumbstruck in the hallway, Mahmood shrugs and closes his door against the chaos.

  Somerton Park greyhound stadium. Newport. Mahmood kisses the betting slips in his right hand and goes to the window of the tote to collect his winnings. The pound notes slam down one after the other until there are twenty of them between him and the teller in his flat cap. Ten weeks of wages sitting there, fat and easy, the edges crisp enough to cut your fingers. Enough for rent, Laura and the children, and his keeping for a little while; the wad is so thick he has to cram it into his starved pocketbook.

  ‘Looks like you’ve had a good day, Sam,’ says the pipe-smoking man dealing out his winnings.

  ‘Sam? My name ain’t Sam.’

  ‘I call all you boys Sam.’

  ‘All you boys. What you mean by that? You think you funny calling us Sambo? I’ll break your skull.’ Mahmood slaps the counter and the man jumps back in fright.

  ‘I didn’t intend any offence,’ he says, holding up his hands.

  ‘You bite first and then you want to cry. Always.’ He shakes his head and then throws the coins into his trouser pocket and looks back to the track. Another race is about to start, new dogs lined up at the gates, steam streaming from their panting mouths, and he feels the excitement all over again, the anticipation somehow more intoxicating than the victory. No, no, don’t be a fool, he tells himself, wills his feet to keep moving, and soon enough he’s back on the empty road, heading for the bus stop.

  On the 73 to the Royal Infirmary, he passes through Cardiff city centre, looking out the grimy window as if at the pictures; totally insulated from the war-beaten and monochrome misery. Its patched-up spires, wooden handcarts, haggard chickens and bloodied rabbits hanging from butchers’ windows, mothers pushing baby carriages with fierce abandon, the broad ivory dome of the town hall blackened with soot, shop fronts drooping loose letters like earrings, teahouses with tuppence specials on buttered bread and a cuppa, boarded windows, fenced-off bombsites. It’s a difficult place without money in your pocket; he’d be happy if they tore the whole place down like the council wants to do to the docks. He doesn’t know how they can look down on Butetown with so little to show for themselves. The Bay emerges out of the industrial fog and sea mist like an ancient fossilized animal stepping out of the water. You might walk along the docks and find sailors carrying parrots or little monkeys in makeshift jackets to sell or keep as souvenirs, you can have chop suey for lunch and Yemeni saltah for dinner, even in London you won’t find the pretty girls – with a grandparent from each continent – that you just stumble into in Tiger Bay.

  The other Cardiff to him means that circuit between factory, home and pub that feels as leaden as the perambulations of a workhorse. He can’t, no, won’t be broken into that. Getting cheated by a pound every week by some crook that thinks you should be grateful for any kinda work at all. Sweeping, cleaning, not getting anywhere near the machines because then they’ll have to pay you a man’s wage. The shame of the canteens, men touching you like a slave on an auction block and asking if you’re black cos you came out of your mother’s arsehole, laughter sickening into a swell that brings bile to his throat. The pink corned beef and boiled potatoes served with a side of ‘an Englishmen, an Irishmen and a nigger walk into a bar’. The white men unhappy, bitter, frustrated of their own accord but treating you like you’re the final insult. He isn’t like the other Somalis, who once slept out with the camels and have only known life to be a bed of thorns and rocks. No. He had always slept in comfort as a boy, on an Indian mattress, with a cup of sugared milk ready for him in the morning, and his mother pouring lines of her own poetry into his ear, praising him. He can’t feel their gratitude. Take the 2s 5d with a nod and a smile though his back is breaking, his nostrils choked with dust, his knuckles stiff and bleeding. White men are nothing special to him, he has known them from a young age, dropping off canvas bags of sugar and tea at the colonial club in Hargeisa and collecting tennis balls on their drought-desiccated court. He can look them in the eye and talk back but it is still hard. Hard.

  ‘You get outta my house.’

  ‘What you talking about, Doc?’

  ‘I ain’t ’bout to start no debate wid you, you ’ave a fortnight to pack your belongings and find other lodging.’

  Monday sits on the armchair, smirking.

  ‘You know what me just about to do, man? Pay you upfront for the next eight weeks. Pay good money for your damp fucking room.’

  ‘Damp? It good enough for everyone else, what make you tink you so high and mighty? You bring trouble to me door from de minute you come. How many time de police knock looking for you?’ Doc kisses his teeth in disgust. ‘You lifting my blood pressure, bwoy, you got your notice, now leave me in peace.’

  ‘It not me they were looking for last night,’ Mahmood says, peeling off notes from his stack to cover the next two weeks before he throws them on to the bedside table.

  ‘And de other times?’ Doc snaps.

  Mahmood shrugs and stalks out of the room.

  He passes Doc’s girlfriend in the kitchen as he heads to the toilet in the yard. ‘What rattled his cage?’

  She’s elbow deep in flour, kneading bread, her flower-printed dress straining at the biceps and he
r thick eyebrows dusted white. She is a tall, broad gal, the way the old-timers like ’em, as simple and maternal as a cow. She was in the papers last year, he’d heard, because Doc went to sea and left too little housekeeping to tide her over, and so in his absence she’d sold his furniture and lived it up. Doc had taken her straight to the police station on his return and pressed charges, but somehow they were still together.

  ‘A man came round from the council to inspect the property this morning, now he thinks you reported him. Did you?’ Her eyes are bright and innocent-seeming.

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘That’s what I told him, but you know what he’s like when he’s got a notion buzzing round his head. You hear about poor Violet Volacki? Murdered last night in her shop by a coloured.’

  ‘That her name? They took away the Jamaican last night, he the man?’

  ‘Don’t look like it, he’s upstairs snoring away, they found the mari-je-wana in his room, that’s what got him in trouble.’

  ‘Stupid man.’ Mahmood spits, he hates dopeheads, hates their laziness, their sleepiness, their refusal to understand this world needs all the alertness and force you can muster.

  ‘Must have been a tussle, she was a sturdy little thing and lived on the docks all her life, doubt she would have been a pushover.’ She slams the dough on to the table.

  ‘He probably just got her from behind like this.’ Mahmood wraps his arm loosely around her neck, smelling the sweet sweat and lavender water rising from her café au lait skin.

  ‘Stop it!’ She giggles awkwardly and squirms in his grip.

  He doesn’t see the grimace on her face, so continues. ‘Then all he have to do is take a razor and cut her throat like this …’ He strokes two dark, tapered fingers across her rigid neck and releases his grip, gliding back on the linoleum to restore the distance between them.

  Her eyes are wide, shoulders frozen high, startled by his touch and worried that Monday or Doc might enter and misconstrue the scene. ‘Ah, get away with you! You made me jump.’

  ‘No need to fear.’ He smiles and holds her gaze for a second too long, just enough to communicate that he is lithe and smoky-eyed and half Doc’s age.

  It is a rare day when Mahmood catches any sunlight, so nocturnal has his life become. Some nights he arrives at his makeshift home at 4 or 5 a.m., finding more amusement in the night than he does in the day. Lacing up his shoes, he swears he will leave Billa Khan’s by midnight, or 1 a.m. at the latest, and head to the Labour Exchange in the morning. It’s been months since he’s had a decent job; the last was at the airfield where he worked as a caretaker, a good, clean job. From blue sea to blue sky, that’s how he’s travelled, drawn again and again to these machines that make the world seem so small and navigable. He’d kept the job for months, turning up on time and keeping his mouth shut, but somehow it had still fallen through his fingers.

  Adjusting his homburg hat – the hat his mother-in-law says reminds her of funerals – low over his eyebrows, Mahmood realizes that there are too many people he doesn’t want to see on the street: the Nigerian watchmaker chasing after a watch he’d snuck out of his pocket, the lanky Jewish pawnbroker who had taken in his bedclothes when he’d had nothing else to pawn, that Russian woman from one of the cafés who he both wants to see and dreads seeing. He takes a deep breath and steps out.

  The A-boards outside the newsagents are still plastered with photographs from London: the flag at Buckingham Palace at half mast, Churchill in his stovepipe hat paying his respects, the new-minted Queen in the back seat of a car with her eyes fixed ahead. The King’s death is turning into a Hollywood production when everyone knows he was a weak man, pampered from birth, unmanned by wealth and too much ease.

  He jumps over the low brick wall surrounding Loudoun Square and cuts across the scrappy grass, the trees hung with swing ropes by children, who have also left behind sweet wrappers and chalk marks on the stone path. Mahmood squints ahead, at a heavy shape between the tree trunks, and softens his footsteps. He approaches and finds a man sunk into the bench, his head downturned in sleep, with a greasy paper bag clenched in one of his grey-knuckled hands. The face frozen between scarf and woolly hat is middle-aged and West African, lost to the world. Mahmood stands over him, watching. He’s not homeless, his clothes and boots are in too good a condition, but why is he out here in the cold with his coat pockets gaping? A worker. Exhausted. Dormant between shifts. ‘Leave him,’ orders a voice inside Mahmood’s skull, ‘leave this motherless child.’ Mahmood turns and continues on to Bute Street.

  This spot beneath his feet, on the corner of Angelina Street, always catches his attention. This gambling corner is where Khaireh raised a gun to the back of Shay’s bald head and spilt his brains all over Berlin’s shoes. At that exact moment, Mahmood had been waiting outside the Paramount Club in London for a blonde who had stood him up; he’d waited two hours, thinking he must have got the time wrong, but the traffic lights flashing on the wet road were all the company he had that night. He should have been here, could have witnessed something he had only ever seen in films – pure, blind, bloody vengeance. Shay was a difficult man, had been warned too many times already about taking the savings lodgers left with him, but no one could have known that Khaireh was that kind of man. To do it in public like that, with a gun and with all those witnesses! It took some balls. He was willing to hang for the sake of his pride. Berlin said afterwards that his legs had almost given way beneath him from the shock, that he’d cradled his dearest friend’s head in his lap as the life left him, that he’d had to wipe that white curdled mess of memories and thoughts from his shoes, that all the street gamblers around him had whispered al-Fatiha as he closed Shay’s eyelids.

  Mahmood raps his cold knuckles against the glass panel, once, twice, three times, rain spitting down as Billa Khan waddles slowly downstairs. He can’t be seen outside this illegal poker club when he’s on probation, so he punches the glass irritably just as Billa Khan swings the door open.

  ‘Masla kya hai?’ Billa Khan pushes a flop of his heavy, oily hair from his eyes and glares up at Mahmood.

  Mahmood barks back in Hindi. ‘Janam mein yeh kaam khatam hoga ya nahin.’

  He waves him in. ‘Jaldee karo, bhai.’

  Another seaman who has stopped going to sea, Billa Khan runs poker nights in his rented room and earns a living that way, taking a pound from each player. He refuses to speak English, so they communicate in the Hindi Mahmood picked up in Aden. Mahmood closes the front door and silently follows the Indian’s wide rear up the stairs. Khan’s bowling-pin-shaped body always amuses him; his fashion of wearing trousers hitched up to near his nipples just exaggerating his narrow shoulders and feminine hips.

  The fire spits, cigarette smoke gathers thickly under the fringed lampshade hanging from the ceiling, and Mohammed Rafi croons a Hindi playback song from the small record player. This is Mahmood’s chosen world and it’s enough to bring a smile to his face. He cases the room. Six men, two big money players: next door’s Jewish landlord and the Chinese laundryman. He nods and they nod back.

  ‘They have given us her back. We have her back.’

  Her skin cold, her lips grey, that wide slash around her neck turned a dull, wrinkled pink and half hidden under a high collar. The coffin Diana has picked out for Violet is a deep walnut with a fine layer of cream silk inside. It looks almost bridal; the quilted silk embossed with flowers along the trim. She had never wanted nice things for herself, always too practical, had worn black widow weeds despite never having had a husband to lose, but now she’ll be carried to her grave in an ostentatious box that has no purpose but to rot with her. The men wanted everything to be halakhah, for Violet to be wrapped in a plain white sheet, but she went out and bought the coffin alone. The house is covered in lilies, blaring scent from every vase, jug and mug that could be mustered. Violet, however, had always hated their cloying smell and the orange pollen that dusted and stained all of her French linen tablecloths. Old friends
who had refused to ever cross the bridge into Butetown have come in large defensive convoys under their umbrellas; bearing dainty bouquets and dishes wrapped in old rags. Violet’s murder – those two words seeming so bizarre and ill-fitting still – proving right all the fears they harboured of the Bay, yet somehow emboldening them to come see the terrible place for themselves. The housewives of Canton, Penarth, Ebbw Vale, St Mellons all coming to gasp at the street gamblers, half-caste children and tumbledown bars with tumbledown women chatting outside. The broad windows of the Volacki shop blinded with black crêpe, the ‘Closed’ sign turned permanently to the world, the Maltese lodging house and Cairo Café, on either side of it, trying to keep the noise and music to a mournful level. Diana could easily drench the whole thing in petrol and torch it: the shop, the house, the street, the city, the world. Why did it deserve to stand? When a harmless woman who had only ever worked and tried to look after her own was slaughtered like an animal in an abattoir. Bleeding to death while her family cut their roast potatoes and asked for the salt in the next room. Why hadn’t she gone to check on Violet when she’d seen that man on the doorstep? He wasn’t someone she recognized but it’s hard to tell a face, especially a dark one, at night under a hat, isn’t it? She should have left that damned dining-room door open so she could have seen or at least heard what was going on. Not closed it like a fool. What kind of people was she living amongst if he could do that, knowing how close they were? Fearless, merciless, brazen. Violet was right to be afraid. Diana grinds her jaw as she washes plates and cutlery at the trench-like Belfast sink. She is rough with the cloth, and the tines of the forks stab into her skin. There is an immense storm of violence brewing in her, sometimes thinning into mist but other times gathering into a dark, lightless mass that chokes her lungs. She could kill someone in that mood, take a little butter knife and plunge it deep into the eye of the next man she sees; only men are the targets of her rage in these lightning-quick fantasies, big, hulking men who need cutting down.

  Inside the toy store, the thick furry bear hangs limp from a large hook on the wall, a red spotted bow tie tight around its neck. Mahmood lifts the chin and sees two yellow marble eyes and a flat smile stitched into the muzzle. It is more than three feet tall, including the immense head with its little boater hat perched between the ears. He wraps his arms around it and lifts it free, his face engulfed in the softness of the fine fur, the bear so well made he almost expects to hear a heart beating inside it. The price is extortionate but it’s been too long since he bought the boys something, and it’s the little Eid in a couple of days. Their mother will probably say that they need new shoes or cots instead but he can’t resist buying them the kind of fripperies he never had as a child: train sets, toy soldiers, drum kits, wind-up monkeys with clashing cymbals. The boys will love the bear, he’s sure, clambering over it the same way they do him. Laura will be satisfied by the navy trench coat that he’s hidden in the canvas bag hanging over his shoulder. It is a double-breasted, double-seamed, satin-lined coat with a nice thick belt to cinch in her trim waist. He had slipped it into the bag, unseen by the half-blind proprietor of A. & F. Griffin. It’s a magic trick that he has perfected under even better scrutiny. The timing, technique and departure all as important as each other, the tiniest hesitation or fumbling and it was all over, the moment lost, or the coppers on your back.