Gilded Edge, The

by Miller, Danny

  With that, Mac finished off the last of the grapes he had brought, and was gone.

  Vince did the only thing that was available to him – apart from throw off the sheets and do a jig on the bedside table – so he lay there and thought about Mac’s lecture on the brave new world of post-war British imperialism. Mac was right: it was nothing that hadn’t already crossed his mind. A mind that even he recognized, if left unchecked, became fertile ground for conspiracies and machinations. But it struck him as disconcerting that Mac, ever the most evenly balanced of men, should have espoused such a theory. If he, the voice of reason, thought something was rotten in the state of Denmark, you could bet your bottom krone that it was in fact a festering bubonic cesspit. Then he thought about Mac’s friend in the markets, and wondered if there really was such a friend. Or if Mac had himself been called into some gloomy room deep in the bowels of Whitehall to face a crescent of seated grey men telling him to keep a lid on his young colleague before a nasty accident befell him. Again.

  CHAPTER 39

  Two weeks later, and Vince was out of the hospital. His body still carried the bruises but they were fading fast and he felt he was getting back to full fitness and form. But he had changed, for he didn’t know if he could take a beating like that again. He felt totally raw; he felt as if his attackers had dipped into his reserve, helped themselves to that bit extra that gave him the confidence to go toe-to-toe with just about anyone, and also the knowledge that he could soak up a beating better than most and yet spring back to his feet again and dole out double. This feeling of uncertainty they’d left him with made him angry, and hungry – hungry for revenge, and to even up the score. He wanted to call them friend in return. He wanted to pound skin, hear bones break and have their blood-soaked pleas in his ears. He wanted to shock them in return, turn the handle and send them to hell with the entire national grid coursing through them.

  It takes a beating like that to make you realize just what you are: a bundle of delicately put together humanity, 80 per cent water and a bag of soft tissues, breakable bones and painful nerve endings. The beating had aged him, thrown him ten years into the future and caused his step to falter. No bad thing, he was sure Mac would say. Maybe that’s why the older detective, after reading the medical report and discovering there was no permanent damage, had put a wry smile on his face.

  After a further two weeks convalescing at home, Vince was fully on his feet, pacing his flat and working up ideas. And the first one that struck him – the alpha in the pack, the one that had been jostling for his attention ever since his eyes had opened in the hospital and he was reasonably compos mentis – was to make a return visit to the Kitty Cat club in Camden Town. With or without his badge, he still wanted answers. And, whilst he wasn’t too bothered about not having a badge to brandish to get the job done, he was worried about not having some other form of backup to brandish when the job needed a little more emphasis. It was all part of the ‘New Caution’ he was adhering to.

  So, before Vince went to Camden Town again, he made some phone calls, and was given the name of a fellow in Kings Cross called Shinny Vaccarro. Shinny was Shinny because he was small, about up to your shins being the reckoning. Of course he wasn’t that small, but the underworld is a world of ready nicknames and gross exaggerations that, once given, tend to stick. Shinny Vaccarro was also an armourer, an underworld quartermaster. He had a good rep, since all his guns were clean, untraceable. He serviced the underworld, naturally, but he also serviced the other side – whenever clean and untraceable guns were called for. It took some greasing of palms and some straightening out, but eventually Vince met up with Shinny in a pub on the Gray’s Inn Road.

  Shinny was improbably tall, about six foot something, heavyset, ginger-haired, ketchup-cheeked and spattered with freckles. And he was obviously not Shinny Vaccarro at all, more like Mick O’Malley. Still, in the private bar he introduced himself as ‘Shinny’, and Vince got the mixed message that either he worked for Shinny or no one got to meet Shinny. Or maybe, just maybe, Shinny didn’t exist. Either way, Vince wasn’t much interested in the ins and outs of Shinny Vaccarro, and he came away from the meeting with what he wanted: a snub-nose Colt .38.

  Vince parked the car in more or less the same spot he had parked it the last time he was in Camden Town, just off Parkway. As he made his way to the Kitty Cat club he was sure he could smell chloroform in the air. The sky was grey and bruised, and looked like crying its thunderous heart out at any moment. So there were a good few people stalking the streets in beige trench-coat style macs. His eyes searched for the two men. His fists buried in his coat pocket were balled and ready to go. The gun in his shoulder holster was loaded.

  ‘That’s a scary-looking face you’re wearing, cock,’ said Trixie, the Marlene Dietrich MC. She was sitting on a tall bar stool in the mirrored reception area of the club. As it was afternoon, she hadn’t yet changed into her top hat, tails and stockings, but instead was in a pair of Levi’s and a checked shirt. On the remark, Vince dropped the paranoid scowl he’d been wearing and pulled a convivial grin. His face no longer ached, but he still wasn’t up to speed on smiling as readily as he once had, and maybe he never would be again.

  ‘That’s better, handsome.’

  ‘You remember me?’

  ‘Of course I remember you – the detective.’

  ‘Is Bernie about?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him in yonks,’ she said, retrieving a large cigar from a handbag sitting on top of the small reception desk. It was faux crocodile, and it held the faux lobster that she dragged around on a lead. She lit her cigar with the unwieldy blue petrol flame of a brass Zippo lighter, paying him careful attention as she did so. ‘You look like you’ve been in a punch-up, lover boy.’

  ‘I was. Just a shame I was sitting down with my hands tied behind my back when it happened. That’ll teach me. So where’s Bernie?’

  She shrugged. ‘We’ve got another feller working the door here now. She’s not as sweet as Bernie, to be honest. I don’t think she approves of us.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘All the men are shes and hers and all the women are hims and hes and cocks and pricks.’

  ‘I see. Then how come you called me “cock”?’

  She shrugged. ‘Relax, you silly little tart. There’s no rules to these things!’

  He laughed. ‘And this new doorman . . . she’s a prude, eh?

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘Live and let live, I say, as long as it doesn’t frighten the horses.’ She laughed at that. ‘Tell me, the new doorman, what did she have to say about Bernie?’

  ‘Ha! You learn fast. She doesn’t say a lot. Larry scares her, you see. She doesn’t get Larry.’

  ‘Larry?’

  ‘Larry the Lobster, silly.’

  Marlene Dietrich puffed a cloud of smoke in the direction of the plastic crustacean sticking out of her imitation-crocodile handbag on the counter.

  ‘Of course, silly me.’

  ‘Believe me, girl, I did question cunty about Bernie, but the dim bitch really didn’t seem to know. You see, I like Bernie. We always chatted, about films, about plays we’d seen. My cock likes squiring me off to the West End for a spot of play watching and a good musical. Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, don’t put your daughter on the stage. I’ll tell you one thing about Bernie, Officer Krupke, she seemed rather out of sorts of late, and no mistake. Not her normal self these last few weeks. Depressed, I’d say. She’s a big old bird, I’ll grant you, but she’s a sensitive soul is our Bernie.’

  ‘I need to talk to him . . . her. Do you have an address?’

  She didn’t. Or he didn’t. But then it turned out she did – or he did. It took some persuasion, but Vince made it clear to Marlene Dietrich that Bernie Korshank wasn’t in trouble. But he knew why Bernie was depressed, and Vince was in a position to alleviate that state of affairs with some information he had for him. Not all lies.

  Marlene Dietrich’
s information was good and took him to a small flat in Stamford Hill. Bernie Korshank’s wife was a small woman, very small – comically so, considering how big Bernie was. She was Polish and spoke in very polite but very broken English. Everything had ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ before or after it. But it wasn’t just her limited grasp of English that forced these mannerly platitudes, for they seemed genuinely heartfelt.

  Vince got the impression that there had been real hardship and sorrow in her past. In her mid-forties, the war wasn’t too distant a memory for her, and Poland and the Jewish ghetto had felt the deathly grip of fascism more keenly than most. And yet here she was, a survivor, just happy and relieved to be living on these free shores, in the Jewish community of Stamford Hill, another enclave but one that wasn’t fenced off and starving, and about to be relocated to a death camp.

  The flat was pink and peach and everything in it was chintz and busy, and cosy beyond belief – or desire for most men. It seemed as unlikely a milieu for Bernie Korshank as any Vince could imagine, since everything here seemed just too small, dainty and fussy for the big bouncer. Including the little Polish wife, who was maybe five foot at a stretch, even in high heels – and those were the kind of heels she looked as though she didn’t possess.

  Vince’s eyes were drawn to the panoply of paintings that covered almost every inch of the walls, walls that were themselves already in full bloom with colourful floral wallpaper. The ornately framed paintings depicted places that looked as if they didn’t exist except in fairy stories or on chocolate boxes. Country-scene idylls with waterfalls and pointy turreted castles in the background, and muslin-frocked and bonneted shepherdesses tending their sheep with smiles on their faces – the shepherdesses and the sheep. It was all quite an eyeful but, after what she might have seen over the years, who could deny her freedom to surround herself with such an idealized narrative of the world.

  Mixed in amongst all the Disneyland on the walls was a sober black and white framed photo of her husband: a head-and-shoulders shot with Bernie in an evening suit and a matinee idol pose. The heavy features were lifted by a gregarious smile, and the inherent brutality and hardness of his visage softened by a smear of Vaseline over the lens. It was a professional job, and the professional who had done the job was Nicky DeVane. The dapper snapper’s signature was clearly wrought in an elaborately scrolled and gilded font in one corner of the portrait.

  But before Vince could fully take on board the implications of this photograph, he was hit with another eyeful. In a polished burr-walnut cantilevered frame, taking pride of place on the mantelpiece, was another black and white photograph, showing Bernie Korshank smiling and shaking hands with someone. Vince recognized the setting, for the shot was taken in Al Burnett’s Stork club. Vince also recognized the man Korshank was shaking hands with. He recognized him from youthful mugshots dating from the last time he had taken a serious pinch, and from periodic newspaper headlines and articles, Pathé newsclips, book covers, and in the flesh once while under surveillance at a Lyons tea house in Piccadilly. Casting an anthropological eye over the picture, Vince thought it spoke volumes. In stature, the other man reached up to about Bernie Korshank’s breast pocket; and yet the powerfully built Korshank seemed stooped and subservient next to the older man. And that was because the man was Billy Hill. The Billy Hill – Boss of Britain’s Underworld was how his ghost-penned bestselling memoir described him. And the man’s reputation was such that no one argued with the description.

  Vince had a lot of questions he needed to ask, so when she offered him a cup of tea and a slice of Battenberg, he readily accepted. Out came the best bone china and then the chat. She told Vince that her husband was off on business in Tangiers, but couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say what kind of business it was.

  Vince knew that Billy Hill had interests in Tangiers, because Tangiers was a very interesting place. Situated on the North African coast by the western entrance of the Straits of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean met the Atlantic, it was a centre for smuggling cigarettes, booze, hash, dope and other contraband. Word was that Billy Hill had been visiting there since just after the war, busy organizing shipments of this and that. Tangiers and the International Zone had become a Mecca for smugglers, spies, speculators, subversives, gamblers, fugitives, counterpart French criminals, Arabic cliques and the literati, with American Beats experimenting with negative morality and cut-and-paste prose. All of these could be found lurking in the twists and turns of the kasbah, where the market was always in the black and everything was negotiable – from stolen money, stolen bearer bonds and stolen documentation to counterfeit versions of all the above. All thrived in the confusion, opportunity and intrigue that the International Zone contained.

  As she served Vince up another dainty cake on a doily, and poured him a second cup of copper-coloured tea, Vince wondered if Korshank had confided in his wife about the business at the Imperial. But considering the cosiness of the surrounding décor, he realized that Korshank probably left the details of the world he operated in at the doorstep. And Vince didn’t have the heart to bring it over her threshold either.

  CHAPTER 40

  Vince wasn’t surprised to hear a girl’s voice over the intercom, but he wasn’t expecting to hear the voice that he heard. As he clanked up the metal grated stairs leading to Nicky DeVane’s studio on Beak Street, he wondered if he’d got it wrong. That seductive and smoky voice hitting all the right notes and oozing class, maybe it belonged to another brittle blonde. Another longlimbed, highly strung and combustible thoroughbred galloping through life, causing chaos and heartbreak. There must have been lots of them in the world that Nicky DeVane inhabited, in fact stables full of them. Then he wondered if he was going to walk into a crime scene: Nicky DeVane corpsed out on the floor, with Isabel Saxmore-Blaine as the killer standing over him, holding a smoking gun. Revenge for her brother? Isabel genuinely committing a murder would have given the case a kind of baroque symmetry, but not the satisfying resolution Vince was looking for.

  ‘Detective Treadwell.’

  It was indeed Isabel who answered the door. Vince didn’t bother to tell her that the ‘Detective’ part of his life, or certainly the title, was suspended. Minus a badge, he had no more right to call himself that than an Oxford Street store dick.

  Vince followed her into DeVane’s studio, noting that she was dressed in what Vince took to be her favourite outfit: black ski pants and a black sweater. Against the white walls and floor of the studio, she cut a dramatic figure, as if she was about to have her picture taken. Then, again, every time he’d seen her, she had looked capable of stepping out of a glossy magazine. No one looked this good, not in the real world. He believed it was called breeding. He knew it was called money.

  ‘I heard what happened to you,’ she said.

  Vince awkwardly brushed the back of his thumb over his cheek. It was a redundant gesture, as there wasn’t anything on it now.

  ‘Do you know who was responsible?’

  ‘We’re working on that.’

  Isabel persevered with more questions, but Vince was still working on putting it all behind him and forgetting. And anyway, it wasn’t an episode he wanted to share, especially with her.

  She finally got the message, made an assumption, and offered: ‘Nicky’s not here. He’s in the Caribbean. He’s shooting a swimwear collection, I believe.’

  ‘Nice work if you can get it.’

  She picked up on his tone, and rather agreed with the old rope analogy that passed wordlessly between them. But, out of loyalty, she put up a defence of the dapper snapper’s profession. ‘I know for a fact that Nicky works very hard on these shoots.’

  ‘Yeah, must be a real slog to be surrounded by beautiful women, with all that sun pouring down on you, and nothing but white sands, blue seas and the finest hotels to break the monotony. May I ask what you’re doing here?’

  ‘Nicky’s letting me stay whilst he’s away. There’s a small flat upstairs. Just until I
get myself fixed up with a new place. As I said, I never want to set foot in my old flat ever again.’

  They stood in a parallelogram of light in the centre of the studio, about eight feet away from each other. It felt awkward, discombobulating. The white studio with its arc and spotlights, and painted backdrops ready to fall into place, made Vince feel as if he was on a stage in one of those modern-dress versions of Hamlet that were all the rage these days. The white mise en scène representing the icescapes of Denmark, or maybe the character’s inner life of emptiness, turmoil, adriftness or some such stuff. Either way, there they stood, like two stranded actors desperately in need of direction. Vince contented himself with a bit of stagecraft and put his hands in his pockets and shuffled some loose change. Isabel clasped her hands behind her back and moved from heel to toe like a ballet dancer, which was a natural enough manoeuvre for her.

  ‘I’m thinking of moving abroad for a while. Maybe back to New York. I have some pretty good work contacts in journalism. Or maybe I’ll spend the summer in Ibiza. It’s one of the Balearic Islands in the Med. I’ll just sit around smoking hash and splashing about in the sea.’

  ‘Why doesn’t that sound as much fun as it should do?’

  ‘Because you’re very perceptive, Detective. My heart’s not in it. But right now I’d rather be anywhere than in London.’

  ‘But why here?’

  She frowned, as if his last utterance was a very peculiar thing to say, then went over to the far side of the studio. Against the wall was a counter set up just like a bar in a cocktail lounge, albeit a very stylized and futuristic one. The bar was all streamlined angles and sprayed silver, with red neon tubing encircling it like the rings of Saturn. It was a bar in which Robby the Robot or the Jetsons might have a drink at. It was obviously a prop for one of Nicky DeVane’s no doubt exhausting photo shoots, with the space race and beyond as its theme. Models in metallic bikinis and kinky boots with fishbowls over their heads, colonizing other planets and making them just like home. Vince saw this as a very optimistic view of the world because the way things were going, what with the Cuban missile crisis still ringing in everyone’s ears, and Dr Strangelove up on the movie screens, Vince didn’t see a rosy future of jetpacks, teletransportation and very attractive green women as an acceptable alternative to the more earthly hues. No, instead he saw a scorched earth, nuclear winters and maybe, one day, them all rising out the primordial sludge only to screw it all up again. But that didn’t sell toothpaste.