by John Harvey
That was what I was up against. They’d found them all right.
From the way the photographs were arranged I could tell that they’d been looked at, but they hadn’t meant anything so they’d been left. I didn’t want to look at them again, but I did anyway. Nothing seemed to have changed. They hadn’t even started going brown with age. I slipped them back into the folder.
Photographs! Poets should come to me with photographs!
I got up and looked at my second stash. They’d found this one too. They’d been more interested in what they’d turned up. The Smith and Wesson .38 had gone, along with a box of ammo.
Why had they taken it?
Guns weren’t hard to come by if you knew the right people and these guys obviously would. So why … ?
My mind went back to the sound of the opening door in the flat in Camden Town; the revolver tight in the man’s hand. I found that I was touching the line of the cut down. my forehead.
Then the phone rang. The sound echoed oddly in the empty office. Strange, I’d never noticed that before. I walked over and picked up the receiver. I didn’t have time to say my name. Whoever was calling knew who I was.
‘Listen, Mitchell. Listen good.’
What did he think I was doing? I was fascinated. Even my grammar wasn’t that bad.
‘You’re poking your nose into all the wrong places. You’re disturbing all the wrong people. Do yourself a favour. Leave it all alone. Forget it. Pretend it’s all been a bad dream. Otherwise you’re liable to get yourself blown away. Like your friend, Warren.’
I didn’t say anything. He seemed to have everything covered pretty thoroughly.
‘You hear me, Mitchell?’
I told him that I’d heard him.
‘Okay. See you do what we say. If you know what’s good for you.’
And he went away as if by magic. My Fairy Godmother. Or should that be Godfather. Whoever it was, they seemed to be making me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
That’s what I should do. Forget it all. Erase the last couple of days, and pretend that they hadn’t happened at all. But now I had George Anthony’s money in my pocket and a job to do. If that job brought me up against people who didn’t fight shy of a little first degree murder then who was I to complain?
I’d taken on the job: taken the fee. Now I had to get on with it.
If I knew what was good for me!
Oh, I knew all right. Lying back in a nice deep armchair, a glass of Southern Comfort in one hand and an almost full bottle close by on the table, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie playing something like ‘I Can’t Get Started’ over the stereo. That was good for me. Or sitting down to a large rare steak, with jacket potatoes dripping with chives in cream, mushrooms and a side salad. That was good, too. Holding late night conversations with the few old friends I thought I still had—somewhere; holding a girl close on a crowded floor, indulging in a little slow dancing; holding the tips of her fingers loosely inside my own as we lay, eyes closed, in the sunlight.
Yes, I knew what was good for me.
Sometimes I thought that was most of my trouble.
I left the office and walked down the stairs and out into the street. A few desultory flakes of snow were falling from out of a wide sky the colour of sour cream. They touched the pavement and disappeared.
I crossed the road, and set off for Soho. I almost got past the coffee shop without going in. Almost was pretty good for me.
Tricia looked as slim as she usually did behind her black and white striped apron. She was stirring a large pan of soup when I went in and the steam had clouded her glasses. She took them off and wiped them clean on the apron before pouring me my coffee. I thought I’d have a piece of flan and some salad. She fixed it for me, shaking her head at the strand of dark hair which kept falling across her face.
I thanked her and paid her and she smiled back and thanked me back and I went over and sat down.
See. Life can be straightforward and simple. When it’s taking its lunch break.
I was turning into Gerrard Street when I first noticed him. Standing in the doorway of a shop doing his best to look as though he wasn’t there.
It wasn’t a dry cleaner’s and he wasn’t me. He wasn’t that good and from the shape of his raincoat he didn’t know what a cleaner’s was for. I hesitated about letting him know that I’d tumbled him.
Finally, I thought I’d let him tag along for a while. He wasn’t going to follow me anywhere I didn’t want to be seen. Not yet he wasn’t.
Jazz clubs in the afternoon are strange places. Like swimming pools when all the water’s been drained out. I stepped past the desk at the front and into the club itself. Chairs stacked on tables; neat piles of dirt and cigarette ends arranged at the ends of rows; a set of drums and a less than grand piano up on the stand; a row of stained beer mats and empty ash trays along the bar. And a single glass. Also empty.
I sat down at one of the tables and prepared to wait.
Outside in the street, I guessed that my new friend was preparing to wait as well.
He had longer to wait than I did.
Twenty minutes or so later, Mike Burns came wandering in, sax case in hand. I wondered idly if he went to bed with it. There had been one or two people in the past I could have asked, but not any more.
Mike didn’t even recognise me at first. Then he did and his face spread into a broad smile. He sort of shuffled towards me, fatter in the face than when I had last seen him. Business must be at least partway good.
He was wearing a crombie overcoat that looked as though all the instalments on it had been paid and a neat leather hat that wasn’t quite big enough for his head.
He must have bought it in leaner times.
‘Scott!’ he said, grasping me by the hand. ‘How are you? Haven’t seen you in ages!’
I shook his hand and he pulled another chair off the table and joined me.
‘You’re not looking too good, buddy. Which particular lamp post did that?’
‘Skip it,’ I told him. ‘It wasn’t any one lamp post in particular. They’ve started going in for random attacks.’
He looked at me with his head on one side, as though he was trying to work out the extent of the damage.
‘So, Mick, things are going well, yea?’
He shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands in mock indifference.
‘You make a little here, lose a little there. You know how it is, Scottie.’
I could guess. At least on that reckoning, he was fifty percent up on me.
‘You get to blow any now, Scott?’ he asked.
I shook my head a little sadly. ‘No, Mick, I couldn’t beat four-time in the middle of a pipe and drum band. Not any more.’
‘You’re kidding!’
He took hold of my hands and held them upwards, examining my wrists.
‘Couldn’t play, nothing. The muscles you’ve still got in these wrists you could play all night. Give it a little time to get back the feel of things and you’d be up there on that stand any time you wanted.’
He let go of my hands and gave me a wink.
‘Hey, Scottie,’ he said, ‘you remember how we started? The times we had?’
Jesus! I remembered. His face hadn’t been fat then; skinny, sallow. I never knew where he got the breath from to blow horn. But blow he had: scales, exercises, tunes. Early Brubeck stuff with me trying to keep a rhythm going using a pair of brushes on the back of an old suitcase. Then, when his old man got fed up with the noise and I had got myself a full kit, we hired this room over a pub in Kentish Town on Sunday mornings.
Well, times had sure changed.
He had his own jazz club and I had.
‘Mick, I’m looking for a guy. I thought you might be able to help me.’
‘Shoot. I’ll do what I can. Anything for
an old pal, you know that.’
‘Right. It’s Gerry Locke. Know anything about him?’
Mick pulled a face. ‘Not too much. He’s a generation after us. Missed the band thing and came up with a lot of small modern combos. Time was when he was reckoned to be one of the men most likely. But he got a need for bread that jazz by itself couldn’t feed.’
‘How d’you mean?’
Mick shrugged. ‘He got hold of the same little habits that a lot of us got into after the bop thing. The difference was that his habit wasn’t so little and it got hold of him.’
‘I see. Same old story.’
‘I’m afraid so. Someone else who thought that if you lived the way Bird did, took the things he took, then you ended up playing like him. Whereas the only thing you did was likely end up dying like him.’
‘Locke didn’t do that?’
‘Not yet he didn’t. Not unless it’s been pretty recent.’
‘So what’s he doing?’
‘Sessions, mostly. And doing pretty well at it. Look on the sleeve of any dozen albums made in this country and you’ll find Gerry’s handled the horn solos on more than half of them.’
‘Any idea where he lives?’
Mick shook his head.
‘Or where I can find out?’
‘That I might be able to help with. Know the drum shop in Golden Square?’
I nodded. I should do. I’d spent my first week’s wages there putting down the deposit on a new snare drum.
‘There’s an old guy who works there. Crippled fellow with a hump on his shoulder. Best drum tuner ever lived. See him. Tell him I sent you down. He knows where every musician in the smoke hangs out. If he can’t help you, nobody can.’
I stood up and held out my hand. Mick took it warmly.
‘Stop by one evening, Scottie. Sit in, even. We could have a ball.’
I walked towards the door.
‘Sure, Mick,’ I said. ‘Sure. I’ll do that.’
I gave him a wave and he waved back. We both knew that I was lying.
When I got back out on to the street I couldn’t see him straight away. But after I’d gone thirty yards I picked him up, pretending to be interested in some flabby-looking nudes outside a strip club.
Who knows? Maybe he was. Somebody had to be and sure as hell it wasn’t me. Though there was Sandy, who’d been a stripper and a good one. But she hadn’t been flabby. There hadn’t been an ounce of surplus flesh on her body.
Not even when she’d given up. There’d just been scars then. Drawn with an open razor down the length of her. After that she hadn’t stripped again.
Not for money. Not for me. Not after that.
She’d taken the razoring for me: that had been enough.
When I got to the drum shop he was still tagging along behind; he watched me from the other side of the square. This time he was doing his best to be enthralled by the jackets of the paperbacks in the Granada office windows.
I soon found my dwarfed percussion expert and when I told him I’d come from Mick Burns he couldn’t do enough for me. I was lucky to get out of the place without a new Premier kit at a twenty-five percent discount. Finally I had to tell him that I was a bankrupt and couldn’t sign cheques.
But I did come out with Gerry Locke’s address.
Which meant that I wanted to lose chummy across the square. If I knew musicians’ working hours, the limbo between waking and going out on a gig was a good time to find them hanging around. Of course, he might be in the studio, in which case I would have a little time to wait.
I walked down into Berwick Street, taking my time, looking on the record stall to see what there was in the way of old 45s. There he was, buying apples a few barrows higher up. He certainly looked scruffy and he didn’t look as though he’d be up to much in a fight, but with the shape of that raincoat it was difficult to tell what muscles lurked underneath it.
I thought I might find out. I went back on my tracks as far as the cinema on the corner. It was showing the usual cheap porno rubbish. Some epic called, ‘Groupie Superior’. The stills outside suggested that it was about a convent full of nubile schoolgirls, lesbian nuns and randy gardeners.
A real education for somebody.
I joined the queue of one and got ready to pay over my eighty pieces of silver. I hoped that the guy in the dirty old raincoat was going to follow me. At least he would look the part. I felt conspicuous in having nothing that I could drape across my lap.
I sat on the end of a row and kept half an eye on the screen, half on the curtain across the entrance. After a couple of minutes he came in, waited while his eyes adjusted to the light sufficiently to work out where I was, then took a seat several rows behind me.
We both settled down to watch the movie.
After five minutes of shots of girls pretending to play tennis and spending all of their time bending forwards as far as they could go in their little tennis dresses, I decided I’d had about as much as I could take.
From the amount of heavy breathing that was going on around me, I wasn’t the only one.
I got up and walked towards the Gents. The thing was, it also led to the exit. He was going to have to follow me in case I was going to use the latter.
He did. I was waiting for him round the back of the first door. I hadn’t gone out, but he was going to. Cold. I hoped.
The thing was, he wasn’t quite as easy as I’d thought. Or else I was getting stale. He took the first punch all right, letting himself be knocked back against the wall alongside the door to the Gents itself. Then he kicked out at me as I went for him. Not direct enough to strike home, but it made me jump back away from him. He pushed into the john and slammed the door in my face.
Now that just wasn’t friendly.
I opened it with the sole of my shoe and went in fast, allowing it to close behind me. He was standing alongside the urinals and with his back to the grubby wash basin.
He had a nasty look in his eye and an even nastier looking knife in his hand. He was waiting for me to make another move and the knife was being held steady enough to suggest that he wasn’t worried.
I should have learnt by now that it doesn’t pay to underestimate people. Except yourself.
But I couldn’t wait all afternoon. At any minute someone was going to want to come in and for a more natural reason than ours.
Although in a place like that you never can tell.
I feinted with my right hand, then swivelled my left shoulder. That should fool him! He didn’t budge. The knife didn’t waver. Why the hell was he looking so bloody confident!
Unless …
Unless I was even stupider than I’d thought possible …
Unless I was being followed by two of them and they’d set it up that smart. One who would make himself obvious enough to let me drop my guard, so that I wouldn’t notice the second one.
Then if the first one lost me, the other could take over. Or if he got into trouble there would be someone around to help him. Which was what he was keeping me at bay for. A cute little threesome. There was even a cubicle each if we needed it.
Another look in his eyes told me that I was right.
He was expecting help to come through that door right enough. I was expecting it. The only thing was, the guy coming through wouldn’t know exactly what to expect.
It wasn’t a very big space and I was able to jump to the other side of the door as he came in. My hands yanked the woodwork away from him. But only for a second. Then I let him have it back. Right in the face.
He didn’t like that. He said so.
The fellow with the knife didn’t like it. He said so too.
Suddenly everyone was getting very talkative. A regular party. I thought I’d join in. The second guy was leaning back against the door frame and he wasn’t looking any too friendly. He
opened his mouth to call me a very rude name and spat out one of his teeth and a spurt or two of blood in the process. Well, it served him right for being so bad-mannered.
Though he had a right to complain. His mouth sure looked a mess. I took another poke at it with my right. My fist crunched into him hard and I thought I heard something cracking behind his pulped lips.
I hoped he had a good dentist.
The guy in the raincoat didn’t think much of me either. He called me something even nastier and lunged at me with the knife. I managed to side-step it and chopped down on his arm as hard as I could. He must have been made of steel.
All I succeeded in doing was hurting the edge of my hand; his arm stayed where it was. He swung it round towards my stomach and I jumped back into the centre of the urinals; the knife missed my gut by a good six inches and a good deal of cold water splashed up inside the back of my trouser legs.
I was going to get out of there.
I hoisted myself up by pressing down on the white porcelain sides that divided the stands and swung myself back slightly. Then I levered my legs forwards. My feet swung together and this time my aim was good. They caught him high on the chest, not far below his neck. He went backwards like something out of a catapult.
Somewhere on the way he collided with his friend and bounced off in another direction, ending up against the exit door rail.
Meanwhile, the one without the teeth was trying to get back into the action. Some guys never learn!
He didn’t trouble with finesse. Just rushed at me as though he was a bull and I was the proverbial shopful of china. One of his arms wrapped itself around my side and the other tried to do the same. I didn’t think I’d let it.
I grabbed hold of it below the elbow with both hands and brought up my knee at the same time. Then I slammed the outside of the arm downwards and didn’t let go. Not even when I did it a second time and he screamed right up high in the top of his head.
I let go of his arm and gave him the old one-two: one to the stomach, two to the jaw. He went back against the door frame one more time.
The raincoat merchant had decided that he wasn’t going to use the exit door after all. He was determined to use his knife instead. I thought this time he might succeed.
