The Last Card

by Kolton Lee

  Having supplied the XJS with a new ventilation system, taking down one man and possibly taking out the driver, Dunstan stopped the Jeep, engine running.

  Inside, he and Ade craned their necks, their eyes wide, searching for Paul. No sign. Where was he? After the explosion of gunfire there was now silence. The engine idled, dogs barked, lights were going on in the houses in the road.

  ‘Did you get him?!’

  ‘Reverse! Go back!’

  ‘Did you fuckin’ get him?!’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Silence, heavy breathing. Nobody moved by the smoking, ruined Jaguar. In another nearby flat the light snapped on. Curtains were twitching. Dunstan slammed the car into reverse, raced it back, screeched to a stop. Ade peered out of his window. Silence. Nothing. His eyes searched the Jaguar, straining to see under it, behind it. Still nothing. He opened his door. About to step out. Wa-wa, wa-wa, wa-wa, wa-wa! It was faint but they could hear it. Babylon coming! Dunstan rammed the Jeep into first, slammed his foot down, popped the clutch. The back of the Jeep smoked as the huge wheels screamed for purchase. Purchase found, engine roaring, still in first, Dunstan and Ade tore into the night.

  ***

  Blairderry Road was once again quiet. More lights came on now, more curtains twitched, bodies were silhouetted in the bright glass. A window opened and an elderly man looked out, squinting into the night. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be and he leant forward, peering into a dark and blurry world. Had he taken the trouble to find his glasses, he would have seen a nearly-new XJS with its front door open, a number of its windows shattered, and the windows that remained splashed with blood. The old man would have seen the body of a black man, balding, probably in his mid-30s, lying face-up, half in and half out of the driver’s seat. If the elderly man had been able to stand it and continue looking, he would have seen another man, a white man this time, about the same age, lying outside the car. This man too had been hit with bullets, in his back, on his arms, through the centre of his right temple. His broken body lay awkwardly across the pavement leaking the evidence of its abuse.

  As the street slowly came alive to take note of the aftermath of the American-style drive-by, a figure, not seen by the old man in the window, lay huddled in his neighbour’s front garden. The figure, wearing a dark suit, crushed himself under the welcoming leaves of a well-manicured hedge. The fact that the figure had his elbow embedded in a relatively fresh dog turd in no way changed the gratitude with which he cleaved to the shadows of the hedge. The figure was Paul Akers and he was shaking, shaken and had his eyes wide open. Unlike his two colleagues, Paul Akers was very much alive.

  20.

  In an alleyway off Vallance Road in Whitechapel, the back door of a shebeen burst open with the force of a kick. As the door flew open three burly Bengali men piled out dragging a struggling and dishevelled H. Once out into the cool of the night, H was tossed like a sack of potatoes on to a smelly, sweating pile of rubbish. Looking down at H without pity, Shohidur, one of the Bengali men, dug his hand into the pocket of his cargo trousers and pulled out a thick coil of notes.

  ‘Take a taxi, H. Get some sleep.’ Shohidur peeled off a twenty pound note and tossed it at him. The night was airless and the note fluttered back and forth, falling gently to the greasy ground. H, bleary-eyed and reeking of smoke and alcohol, sat up on the rubbish to face his persecutors. He ignored the note lying next to him, examining instead the tear that had appeared along the seam of his lucky suit, under his right arm. He looked up at Shohidur. One of the other Bengali men smiled down at H and said something in Sylheti. All three of the Bengalis laughed and H’s face darkened.

  ‘Ask me, Shohidur. ‘H was aware of a thick burr to his voice, put there by the six shots of Jack Daniels he’d had in quick succession.

  ‘Ask you what?’

  ‘Ask me why the three of you look so fucking ugly when you laugh!’ The three stopped laughing. ‘You’re like the three fucking gargoyles on the corners of the Chrysler building in New York. You know the one I mean? Yeah, yeah, the three of you are like, like, like masterpieces of gothic masonry. It’s the extended foreheads and the big mouths full of brown stained …’

  That was as far as H could get before the side of Shohidur’s shoe caught him a glancing blow on his cheek. Luckily he’d seen it coming and had just managed to move his head. Had he caught its full weight it could have been all she wrote. Shohidur leant down and picked up the twenty pound note he’d so casually dropped for H’s taxi-ride home.

  And with that the three Bengalis were gone. H heard the door being heavily bolted and barred from inside.

  He sat on the pile of rubbish for several minutes, his chin resting on his hands. As he stared blankly into the blackness of the night he gradually became aware of the poster on the wall opposite. It was a billboard poster of a boxer. The poster was old, advertising an up-and-coming fight that had, in fact, long gone. The boxer whose picture hung smiling in the blackness of that grubby, Whitechapel alleyway was Henry ‘Bugle Boy’ Mancini.

  H had come straight down from the Grundy Park Leisure Centre to this Bengali-run shebeen in Whitechapel. Operated by the diminutive VJ, Whitechapel’s longest-running illegal gambling shebeen was a haven for less-than-devout Muslims from all over London. As well as the Muslims, the usual West End habitués often stopped in to give VJ’s a run and the games were accompanied by entertainingly raucous and sometimes violent discussion about world affairs. The mood H had been in that night meant it was exactly the atmosphere he needed: a reminder that the world had problems bigger than his.

  H didn’t necessarily have to participate in these discussions; just listening was entertainment enough. He could remember one particularly entertaining night when the topic of discussion had been about Bill Clinton, and his ill-fated affair with that intern Monica Lewinski. A number of the clientele in the shebeen that night were big fans of Clinton. They couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

  The topic in the house on this particular evening was the continuing presence of George W. Bush’s American troops in Iraq. As H sat himself down at the table with worries of his own swirling around in his head, the discussion was already in free flow. Since the ramifications of Bush’s decision were of particular significance to the largely Muslim gamblers, the mood round the table was as raucous as usual but less humorous.

  ‘That fucking Bush! He needs to be dealt with,’ scowled a young Pakistani mechanic called Harwant who had arrived in London from Birmingham two or three years ago. He threw his beaten hand into the middle of the table in disgust. ‘They should deal with him like the IRA used to; shoot off his kneecaps.’ The violence of his comment was no doubt prompted by the failure of his pair of aces to result in a win.

  Whatever the reason, it was received with general nods of approval – despite Harwant’s failure to outline who ‘they’ should be. H, meanwhile had also lost the last hand and as his worries mounted he listened to the conversation flowing around him with only half an ear.

  ‘Wha’ you tarkin’ about? You cian’ do dat to the President!’ This was the elderly and feisty Sanjay, the Trinidadian Indian who had lived in London for the last twenty-five years and who smoked incessantly.

  ‘Why not? They shot the Kennedys, they shot that black leader, Martin Luther King; they can shoot Bush!’ Harwant drained his shot of rum and coke and held up his empty glass. A plump woman in a sari silently took it from him and went away to refill it.

  ‘You don’ see de man ’ave body guard aroun’ him 24-7?!’ Sanjay was so incensed by Harwant’s naiveté that he coughed and hawked loudly into a handkerchief. He carefully examined the result of his loud lung evacuation, wrapped it up and slipped it into his trouser pocket.

  ‘I don’t care about that; he’s a dangerous man.’

  ‘And you don’t think Bin Laden is equally dangerous?’ Devinder was a Bengali man in his late 60s and was generally accepted as being the most widely read of the shebeen’s habitué as well as being
a fair poker player. In keeping with the esteem with which he was held by the other Muslim players he spoke in a soft voice.

  ‘Bush is a colonialist and the world has seen enough of colonialists!’

  ‘Dis is not a colonial war. Were you not dere to see the pictures of the two towers in New York burning?’ H was only vaguely aware of who Devinder was but by this point in the evening he didn’t care. Things were not going well for him and an element of desperation had entered his play. His customary coolness under pressure had deserted him and he was still waiting for his first win of the night.

  VJ always allowed the alcohol to flow freely and despite the number of Muslims in the house, the drinks were always consumed with enthusiasm. H was no slouch in the drinking stakes and was well into his third Jack Daniels.

  ‘Terrorism is an evil! It’s an evil! It has been taken to a new low. And it has made the world a much more dangerous place.’

  ‘And who are you to define who is a terrorist and who is not a terrorist?’ This was Manmohan, the manager of the petrol station on Cambridge Heath Road.

  ‘More dangerous than terrorism is that black woman who hangs on Bush’s shoulder like a vulture. What’s her name? Something Rice?’

  ‘She’s a hawk, not a vulture.’

  ‘She looks like a love machine. I quite like her.’

  ‘That’s because you haven’t had sex in a long time, sir.’

  ‘Fucking hell! That woman should be forcibly strapped in a burqa.’

  ‘And that is precisely my point,’ said Devinder in a silky voice. ‘The burqa is an instrument of repression that is holding much of the population in the Middle East in bondage.’

  Devinder’s observation made the others stop and think. But not so deeply that they would look at the plump woman in the sari in a new light as she returned with Harwant’s rum and coke. Devinder now waved her over. He handed her his full glass of whiskey and water.

  ‘This tastes like mosquito piss, take it back. Bring it back with a decent amount of whiskey in it.’ He imperiously waved her away and turned back to more important things. ‘You see the problem with the worst excesses of Islam, fundamentalists like those bastards the Taliban, is that the oppression of women is a wastage of human resources. The state of much of the Middle East today suggests to me that they cannot afford to waste fifty per cent of their intellectual resources.’

  ‘You tarkin’ like you smart, Devinder, but you tarkin’ shit! You see my wife?’ Sanjay squinted at the hand that had just been dealt to him. ‘I would love to hol’ ’er in a burqa.’ He suddenly whip-lashed his index finger and the finger next to it together with loud crack. Evidently Sanjay was pleased with the cards he had been dealt. ‘I tell she me is a man an’ I want to come out and pass some time wid de boys,’ he smiled broadly at his cards as he sorted them out in his hand, ‘an’ she want to start!’ He looked up and around the table. ‘Who going firs’?’

  For H, who went first no longer mattered. He would usually have interjected his own thoughts into the conversation and banter that flowed all around him. Tonight, however, was not one of those nights. He lost his hand and over the next two hours he lost many more. It was at the loss of his last £20 pounds – from the £300 that had been his purse from the evening’s boxing – that he finally lost his temper and rose unsteadily to his feet, grabbed the edge of the gambling table and tipped the whole thing – cards, money, drinks – over on its side. The shouting, cursing and threats that followed were ended when the Houseman, Shohidur, and his henchmen grabbed H. They frogmarched him to the exit at the rear of the shebeen and threw him into the rubbish.

  ***

  As H sat and contemplated his fate, he looked away from the image of the smiling Mancini, apparently sent to taunt him, and dipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket. He pulled out his talisman. He looked at it for a long time, waiting for it to explain why his life was going so badly wrong. He had four days left with which to find £15,000 pounds. Four days! Having stared drunkenly at the lighter for a while and found no answers, H slipped it back into his pocket, eased himself off the rubbish heap and headed for the end of the alley.

  Back on Vallance and rubbing the cheek where he’d been kicked, H turned right and walked with difficulty to Hanbury Street, where his car was parked in the shadow of a tower block. The first thing he saw was the broken glass on the passenger’s seat. Suddenly he knew this night could still become worse. He walked round the car and saw that the front window had been smashed. The stereo had been ripped out. Adding insult to injury was the front door on the driver’s side, unlocked. The smashed windows were a wanton act of vandalism. H walked around the car to see if any other damage had been done. The front two tyres had been slashed. Why?

  ‘Fucking … Jesus Christ!’ H swore under his breath. The insult to his gun-metal grey, vintage Mercedes, circa 1973, sobered him. He stood up straight, hoping to see the vandal. The streets were empty. He turned, pulled up the collars on his lucky suit and wandered off, back past the shebeen to the Whitechapel Road. He didn’t know where he was going but did know that he couldn’t face his empty flat in Battersea.

  Tired and footsore, H walked down Wardour street. He hadn’t been heading anywhere in particular, but as he neared the centre of town it seemed natural to aim for Blackie’s shebeen. The night was warm and H had walked all the way from Whitechapel. And while he walked, H thought. About Beverley, about Akers, about his boxing, about his life.

  Did he really love Beverley? Or was she just a convenience? Certainly he loved Cyrus but the fact that he was less certain about Beverley worried him. He was deeply hurt by her abandonment of their relationship. Why had she done that? Of course, he knew why she’d done it, but still … why had she done it? Then he thought about his boxing. Why did he continue? Was he trying to prove something? Did he even enjoy boxing any more? And what about the connection Beverley saw between his gambling and the boxing? Was she right about that?

  And finally H came back to the £15,000 he owed Akers! £15,000 pounds! Why was it that H was walking along the embankment with absolutely no money to his name? None! Zero! How was it that H, a grown man of thirty-two, could possibly have allowed this to happen? England is the fourth richest nation in the world; was it that H was so dumb, so inadequate, that he couldn’t carve himself a slice of that wealth?

  All these thoughts and more ran round and round H’s head. And the more they ran the more one single thought seemed to dig into him. It was a rising sense of panic that somehow he was becoming invisible. He was walking past people, watching them, and they all seemed to be oblivious to him, to his presence, to his physicality. He was like a ghost, like a shadow, flitting though the streets of London. He wanted to shout, he wanted to jump up and down, wave his arms about: Hey! Look at me! I’m here! I exist! I’m not a shadow, I’m real, I exist!

  So deep in thought was H that he missed the turning to Blackie’s shebeen and continued on down Wardour Street. As he was passing Meard Street, on the left, he saw a small crowd of people, hanging around outside the nightclub Gossips. He stopped. The vague bass line thump of Burning Spear’s ‘Marcus Garvey’ insinuated itself into his head. With its lilting melody a memory floated into H’s mind. He and Spiky Conway, a white school friend, had first heard this track in a record shop in Brixton. Something about it immediately appealed to both of them and H had promptly started skanking – the popular dance style of the day – right there in the record shop. As H bent his knees and poked out his small bottom, bobbing it up and down in time to the music, Spiky began to copy him. Neither H nor Spiky could dance particularly and the sight of the two of them – they couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old – had the shop assistants in stitches as they bobbed and bounced in time with the music …

  H’s eyes suddenly pricked with tears.

  21.

  As a burst of weak sunlight streamed in through grimy windows, H lay sprawled and sleeping on his mattress. He was still in his lucky suit, still
wearing his shoes. Lying next to him on the floor was his talisman and, next to that, his goldfish, swimming in its bowl.

  H’s eyes opened as he slowly came to. Jesus Christ! His head was killing him. He didn’t move a muscle except the small ones that controlled his eyes. He needed these to stare up at the ceiling. His head was pounding, throbbing in waves. For the first time, and it was a surprise to him, he saw what a terrible job somebody had done in painting up the bedroom. H wondered why he had never noticed that before.

  H tensed his neck and then moved his arms as he propped his body up. He groaned as he looked around. The room was a mess. He swung his feet round, clambered off the mattress and walked stiffly through to the kitchen.

  In the cupboard above the small cooker, sitting on top of a tin of pilchards, was a bottle of Aspirin. He swallowed two with a glass of water and then looked in the fridge. Inside, lurking at the back, was half a carton of milk, a dry, crusty lump of cheese and a mango. H lifted out the carton and put it to his nose. He withdrew it quickly and poured its curdled contents down the sink.

  Above the sink was a window that looked out over the back of the flats. Leaning his forehead against the glass, H watched the life of the estate continue; oblivious to his problems. Reggie was outside tinkering with his ancient BMW, which H was sure he had been working on for as long as the two of them had been neighbours. A number of small children played on the nearby swings. Two old ladies, one white, one black, walked slowly arm in arm along the grass verges that surrounded the estate. Life went on.