by Ted Lewis
“What I’m talking about is that Swann never went back whence he came,” Cross says. “As far as I can discover he never even left Bow Street. He did, of course, but nobody saw him go. And as nobody saw him go, well . . . ”
Cross leans forward and taps on the partition and slides back the glass and says to the driver, “Turn round and stop on the other side of the road.”
The driver does as he’s told. Now it’s my turn to look out of the window. The rolling slope of Primrose Hill swings into view and beyond it the smudgy city shimmers through the steamy window. The cab stops and rain sweeps against its bodywork.
“I’ve asked everyone that can be asked,” Cross says, “and nobody knows a dickybird.”
“And so what do you think?”
Cross allows himself a faint grin. “Approximately the same as you,” he says.
When I don’t say anything Cross says, “Well, there
you are.”
Then he leans forward and slides open the partition again and tells the driver to take us back to Plender Street.
On the way Cross says, “If, for one reason or another, this turns out to be the last time we meet on a professional basis, I’d just like to be able to think that when you remember all the little favours I’ve done you and Gerald and Les, then you’ll forget you ever heard my name or saw my face.”
I put my hand in my inside pocket and take out the envelope and put it against Cross’s mouth and push upwards, causing the envelope tobuckle against the underside of his nose, forcing his head back onto the shelf behind the seat.
“Listen, cunt,” I tell him, “what’s in this envelope is all you get in return for your favours. And just remember this: I’m not so stupid that I don’t tumble you’re just telling me half of what you know, like you always do. So if there’s a time when there’s a few names flying this way and that don’t forget that yours begins with the third letter of the alphabet.”
The taxi draws up behind my Rover and Cross tries to get the envelope away from his face and says, “What I’ve told you is all I know.”
“Oh yes? Well if there’s anything you’ve overlooked then phone me or Gerald or Les before ten o’clock tonight. Now take your pigging money and let me get out.”
I let go of the envelope and it falls in Cross’s lap. While he’s smoothing out the envelope I open the door and rain spits into the cab. I look at my watch. Sod Gerald and Les. They can wait for an hour. I slam the cab door behind me.
--
Audrey
I’m lying back in bed, smoking, and I say to Audrey who I’ve just lit up in more ways than one, “Isn’t it about time you had your nails cut,” and she says to me, “Leave off, you know that’s one of the bits you enjoy best,” and I must admit she’s right, only of course I don’t admit it to her. I take a few more drags and look down my body and at her body which is naked except for the half-slip which, time being of the essence, we never got round to taking off. The slip’s all twisted up round her waist except for a little bit of lace edging that’s overlapping the top few curls of her pubic hair. I reach down and pull the slip away so that she’s all exposed and she gives me a look. “Do me a favour.” I tell her, “Not yet, what do you think I am, James Bond?” She pulls a face. “All it is,” I say, “is that it’s a long time till your next visit to the hairdresser’s, isn’t it, and I like to remember,” and she says, “Funny.” At first I don’t tumble and then when I do of course I have to laugh.
I finish the cigarette and get off the bed and walk over to the table where we’d left the vodka and ice and slices of lemon and I liven up my half-empty glass and ask Audrey if alcohol might not be an anticlimax after what we’ve just been through and she says, “What about you then?”
“I’ve got to steady my nerves down after that,” I tell her and she says, “Well, you’d better give me one because I’ve got to steady mine down because I’ve got to phone Gerald. I’m late.”
“I’ve got to phone him too,” I tell her. “I should have been at the club an hour ago.” I make her drink and take it over to the bed picking up the phone on the way. Audrey takes a drink but she doesn’t touch the telephone, just stares at it, as she lies there propped up on her elbow. “Someone, somewhere wants a phone call from you,” I say, but all I get for that is “Piss off.” I shrug and take a drink and sit down on the edge of the bed. “You know what would happen, don’t you,” she says. I know what’s coming but I don’t say anything. “I mean,” she says, “if Gerald ever got to know about us.” “Yes, I know,” I tell her. “We’d both be dead.” “No,” she says. “You’d be dead, you’d be the lucky one. What he’d do to me would be much more interesting. I mean, Gerald really enjoys going to work.” “I know all about Gerald,” I tell her, lighting up another cigarette. “You think I don’t know about that?”
“I must be bleeding barmy,” she says, and I tell her yes, she must be bleeding barmy. “I mean,” she says, “doesn’t it worry you?” “ ’Course it worries me,” I tell her. “What do you think?” “Well, you never seem to,” she says. “No,
well . . . ” I tell her. Then there’s a long silence and after that she picks up the phone and dials the number. I lie back on the bed and rest my head on her stomach. You’ve got to give her credit for being a great little performer because when the receiver’s lifted at the other end she delivers “Hello sweetheart,” just the way she does whenever she phones me. I can hear Gerald’s reply even from where I am. “What the fucking hell do you want?” he says. “Oh, bleeding charmin’,” Audrey says, her hand over the receiver, “just bleeding charming.” “Look,” he says, “didn’t I tell you I’m having a meeting all afternoon? Didn’t I tell you that?” I transfer my cigarette to my other hand and reach up and start massaging Audrey’s breasts. She tries to push my hand away but her being propped up on one arm and holding the receiver in her other hand she doesn’t have much joy. I carry on with the therapy and she says, “Yes, I know, darling, but I had to phone and tell you why I’m going to be a little late because I know how you worry.” “All right, let’s have it,” Gerald says. “So why are you going to be late?” I take hold of her arm and pull her forward so that she overbalances off her elbow and falls with her breasts resting on my lower stomach. She mouths silent rage at me but Gerald’s voice rasps down the line and she has no time to recover her previous position. “The thing is,” she says, “I ran into Yvonne in the hairdresser’s and what with Harry just being sent down she wanted to talk, you know, so I’m back at hers now. God knows how I’ll get away, you know what she’s like . . . ” “Fucking Harry,”
Gerald says. “A right bright bastard he is. Serves him bleeding right, don’t it? I mean, going out with those fucking
amateurs, fucking ponces . . . ” Gerald stokes himself up on the subject of Harry and I slip my hand behind the back of her neck and push her head down until I can feel the warmth of her breath tickling the tip of my prick and the closeness of her breathing begins to take effect because she looks from it to me and her expression changes and a different kind of wickedness appears in her eyes and she lays the receiver on my belly, the mouthpiece against my prick-end, takes me in hand and begins to go to work, all the time looking into my eyes, and all the time Gerald’s barking voice reverberating through the plastic against my skin. Eventually Gerald’s voice stops and Audrey puts her mouth next to the mouthpiece, her lips brushing my tip, and she says, “I know, darling, you were right, you were always right about Harry, especially when you got rid of him. I mean, how could you trust a man who’s stupid enough to trust those ponces, you could see it coming,” and Gerald says, “Too fucking true, he was a berk.” Audrey says, “Anyway, I’ll be back as soon as I can. If I’m back too late tell Ann-Marie no later than seven with the kids, you know she spoils them,” and Gerald says, “Right,” and
she says, “How about a kiss, then?” “For Christ’s sake,” Gerald says, “you k
now who I’ve got here?” “I’m not going to let you go without a kiss,” she says. “Oh, all right,”
Gerald says and makes a kissing noise down the phone, and she fakes one back, only her lips, when she purses them, are kissing me, and like I say, not on my mouth. The line goes dead and she carries on with the kissing.
After Audrey’s gone I have a shower and do myself a steak and salad. Gerald and Les can wait a bit longer. They’re not to know what time I met Cross. While I’m eating my steak and having an extra couple of drinks I watch television but I really don’t take anything in because I’m thinking of what Audrey said about being barmy carrying on together. I’d had that thought ever since we’d first tumbled. But the alternative, rowing out, just wasn’t on as far as I was concerned. Not since that very first time. Every bird I’ve ever had was just so much cold meat compared to Audrey. And in any case, trying to row out from a bird like Audrey would be just as dangerous as the present situation. The shit would fly whatever I did. So as usual I give up thinking about it and put on my gear and start out for the club.
--
Gerald and Les
The rain has stopped and the greasy streets are full of tourists trying to turn up the naughty bits of London. I get out of the cab and unlock the sober sage-green painted doors and Alex is standing there behind the lobby’s glass doors, his teeth highlighted whiter than ever beyond the glass’s bright reflection. I push open the glass doors and Alex helps me off with my coat.
“Anything?” I ask him.
“Nothing yet, Mr. Carter. A small game in the Green Room but it won’t get any bigger. The rest are just drinking.” Up above me there is the faint sound of Motown-style music.
“All the girls reported?”
“All of them,” Alex says.
I walk over to the plain door next to the cloakroom and unlock the door and open it and slide back the cage doors of the private lift and press the button. The lift only has one stop and that’s Gerald and Les’s penthouse office on the top of the club. The lift smells like the inside of a stripper’s G-string which isn’t surprising considering the amount of slag traffic it’s carried since my bosses, the Fletcher brothers, had it installed eighteen months ago. You’d have thought Gerald would have had enough of slags considering the route by which the two of them arrived at the top of the building that was now the centre of their operation. But not Gerald. Slags to him are like scotch to an alcoholic. Not that Les is a total abstainer but more often than not he’ll pour himself a drink and watch Gerald get on with it, with the kind of mild interest someone else would watch a couple of kittens at play. Les lives his life more in his head than Gerald does.
The lift stops and I get out. I’m in a small windowless hall. There is only one piece of furniture, a leatherette swivel armchair, and sitting in the armchair is Duggie Burnett. He’s wearing a hound’s-tooth suit—two buttons with side vents, narrow trousers with deep turn-ups—a yellow waistcoat, a Viyella check shirt and a plain woolen tie. He’d look like something straight off the early-morning downs at Newmarket if it wasn’t for the fact that his nose is on sideways and the rings he wears on each of his fingers aren’t there just for show. At the present moment he has a serviette tucked in his waistcoat and he is genteelly balancing a plate of sandwiches on his knees. The sandwiches have been daintily cut and served up with slices of tomato on top and a patterned doily underneath but Duggie is absorbed in gently taking the sandwiches apart and placing the salad stuff to one side and picking up the slices of ham with his fingers and eating them that way. Each time he places a slice in his mouth he thoroughly cleans the grease off his fingers with his handkerchief. I stand there watching him for a minute or two before I say anything to him.
“And supposing I was Wally Coleman and six hundred of the fellows that walk behind him?” I ask Duggie. “What would that make you and Gerald and Les by now?”
“But you ain’t,” says Duggie, not looking up from the disemboweled sandwiches. “If you was you’d be headfirst down that lift shaft with a bullet up your arse, no trouble.”
I grin at him.
“All right,” I say. “Let them know who’s here.”
He wipes his hands again and picks a handset off the wall next to him.
“Jack’s here,” he says, and puts the handset back on its cradle.
The door opposite the lift slides open and as I go in I say to Duggie, “Incidentally, it’s on the news a gorilla got out of Regent’s Park Zoo this afternoon. Haven’t caught him yet. If I was you I’d stay at home tonight.”
The door slides to behind me. I’m in another hall, bigger than the last. This hall has furniture, Regency repro, and gold-framed pictures, but there still aren’t any windows. The hall is lit by a single light set dead centre in the ceiling. There is another door, a replica of the one that is the entrance to the club, painted the same colour. I press a button on the wall next to the door and a second or two later the door is opened by another mug called Tony Crawford, the only difference between him and Duggie being that Tony’s gear is ten years out of date and that he’d eat the ham and the bread and the doily and the plate.
“Right, piss off, Tony, this is a meeting now,” says Gerald.
Tony closes the door behind me.
The room I am in is all Swedish. It’s a big room, low-ceilinged, and when Gerald and Les had it built on top of the club they’d let a little poof called Kieron Beck have his way with the soft furnishings. Everything about the room is dead right. The slightly sunken bit in the middle lined with low white leather settees with backs reaching the normal floor level, the honey-coloured polished floor itself with its scattered furs, the office area over by the window which runs all the length of one wall, the plain white desk that is worth half an Aston Martin, the curtains that make a noise like paper money when you draw
them—everything is perfect. The only things that look out of place are Gerald and Les. So much so that they make the place look as if you could have picked all the stuff up at Maple’s closing-down sale.
Gerald is sitting in the sunken bit, making the leather look scruffy. He is wearing a very expensive three-piece suit, gray chalk stripe, but with it he is wearing a cheap nylon shirt and a tie that looks as though he’s nicked it off a rack in Woolworth’s. His shoes are black and unpolished and one of the shoelaces is undone. But even if the shirt had been tailor-made from Turnbull & Asser and the tie had come from Italy and the shoes had been handmade at Annello & David he would still look a mess. One of those people that make a difference to the clothes instead of it being the other way round. Les, on the other hand, is immaculate. He is perched with his arse on the edge of the white desk, smoking a Sobranie. He’s wearing one of his corduroy suits, the pale beige one, and with it he’s got on a lavender shirt and a carefully knotted brown silk tie, a pair of off-white suède slip-ons and socks that match the colour of his tie. What is left of his hair is beautifully barbered, just curling slightly over the collar of his shirt.
Audrey is there as well.
She’s over by the cocktail cabinet, getting the drinks together.
“So,” says Gerald, “we’re finally here at last, then.”
I sit down on an armless easy chair in the raised-up part of the room. I don’t say anything. There’s no point until Gerald and Les have run through today’s double act.
“I mean, we thought maybe Cross had nicked you or something.”
Gerald laughs at the others, encouraging them to
appreciate his wit.
“We thought he might have nicked you for being double- parked,” Les says in his humourless voice.
Audrey gives Gerald and Les their drinks, then pretends to remember that I’m there and I just might want one as well.
“Do you want one, Jack?” she says.
Gerald laughs and says, “Do you want one, Jack? Eh, Audrey, why don’t you give him one?”
/>
He almost falls off the settee, he’s laughing so hard.
“No thanks,” I say to Audrey, looking her straight in the eye. “I had one before I came here.”
Les frowns and says, “You dropped off for a drink before you came here?”
“That’s right.”
Les looks at Gerald and Gerald says to me, “Listen, you mug, we told you to come straight back here. What’s the fucking idea?”
I look at Les and say, “Les, I left Cross three-quarters of an hour ago. After what he told me I didn’t think a swift vodka and tonic would make all that much difference.”
“Why?”
I take out my cigarettes and light up.
“Because,” I tell them, “it’s my opinion that Jimmy has been done good and proper and he’s weighed up twenty-five years against appearing for the Queen. Against us. And various other past associates that we don’t need to mention here.”
Gerald stands up and begins to turn bright red. “Bollocks!” he says. “Bloody bollocks. Christ, what, with Finbow? Jesus, all Finbow has to do is pick up the phone and he’s a few grand better off and Jimmy walks out a victim of circumstances. Besides, Jimmy’d never shop us. He’s Jack the Lad. Jesus, Jimmy and me are like bleeding cousins. From way back.”
“In any case,” Les says as he lights a new cigarette from the end of his old one, “the cunt wouldn’t dare.”
“No,” Gerald says. “He’s right. The cunt wouldn’t dare.”
I shrug. There is a silence. Audrey crosses her legs and the nylons sound like static on a cheap transistor.
Les pushes his hands in the pockets of his jacket and the smoke from the cigarette in his mouth causes him to narrow his eyes and hold his head back so that he’s squinting up at the ceiling.
