by Ted Lewis
The lift stops and we both stand there for a while without getting out. Then Audrey pushes herself away from the lift wall and crosses the hall and unlocks the door that leads into the penthouse. A moment or two later I follow her in and as I cross the hall I notice that the chair in the corner is empty.
Audrey is already halfway down the drink she’s poured herself. The two half-finished breakfasts are still on the Swedish desk. I sit down on one of the settees.
“They talked about clearing off this morning,” I say. “But I thought it was just talk. I really didn’t think the bastards’d pull this one.”
“So what do we do?” Audrey says. “Are you any closer to Jimmy?”
I tell her about this morning’s events.
“Jesus,” she says. “It gets bleeding worse.”
“I mean,” I say to her, “what do I do with Charlie and his bleeding mother? I can’t turn them out and I can’t keep them at the Garage forever. And I certainly haven’t started knocking over sixty-year-old boilers yet.”
“We could always do the other thing,” Audrey says.
“What’s that?”
“We could always do what Gerald and Les have done.”
I shake my head. “No, when we go we take everything with us.”
“I’ve got plenty,” Audrey says.
“Not enough. I’m thinking of years, not months.”
“So what do we do?” Audrey says again.
“I’ll have to go back to the Garage. My flat’s out for the moment until I find out the reactions to this morning’s circus. I’ll just have to try and operate from there, at least for today.”
“And what about me?”
“You’ll have to stay here in case I need you. If we’re taken together, that’s no good to either of us.”
Audrey knocks back the rest of her drink.
“Great,” she says. “Just like Gerald. Take care of things while I’m gone.”
“Look, don’t fuck me about, Audrey. All right? You know I’m talking sense. I’ve got to try and come up with Jimmy and I’m not going to be able to do that sitting in West End Central, am I? And if I don’t come up with Jimmy in the next twenty-four hours we’ll have to get out of it before they start making the arrests. Because after what’s happened today it’s for certain they’re going to start pulling in no time, before Jimmy’s star players give him the elbow.”
Audrey doesn’t say anything but instead she pours
herself another drink. There’s no point in trying to engage her in a debate so I get up and go over to the door.
“If Con turns up, get him to call me at the Garage,” I tell her. “And stay sober till six o’clock because that’s when I’ll be calling you. And if Old Bill calls I’ve been here all morning.”
After I’ve left the club I pick up the yobs’ car and drive back to the Garage and while I’m driving I try and sort things out in my mind but nothing is clearly enough defined for me to separate it and try and apply some kind of perspective. The only thing that is clear is that if Jimmy Swann isn’t nailed quick and sharp then I’ll have all the time there is for me to do my thinking.
I turn the car slowly in to the alley where the Garage is and I can see straight away that there is going to be no way I’m going to be able to park outside the Garage because although Kirk’s car is no longer in the alley, two other cars are parked by the open doors, nose to nose, making it impossible for anyone else to get by. Which is the general idea, because between the gap made by the bonnets of the two cars, about half a dozen heavies are shepherding through Mrs. Abbott and the patched-up Charlie. The minute they notice the arrival of the yobs’ car the whole process is speeded up somewhat. Mrs. Abbott and Charlie are hustled round to the open doors of the furthest car and the heavies begin to fill up the remaining seats. I crash through the gears and put my foot down and drive straight for the boot of the nearest car. One of the heavies produces a shotgun and gets between me and the boot and prepares to blast out my windscreen but then he thinks better of it and hurls himself out of the way just before I crash into the back end of the first car. But another of the heavies hasn’t moved quickly enough out of the space created by their two cars and is caught between the two bonnets as they shunt together and he screams and the driver of the furthest car throws it into reverse and it backs off down the alley with the crushed heavy hanging on to the bonnet for some of the way until his fingers give out and he slips to the ground like a falling blanket. The nearest car I’ve crashed into also begins to move off and the driver doesn’t slow down just because there’s something lying between him and the end of the alley. There is a squeak of springs mixed together with another, higher pitched sound as the car goes over the fallen heavy. The heavy who was going to do me with the shotgun races after the two cars, not even looking down at his fallen partner as he hares past him.
The cars and the heavy disappear round the corner and the alley is quiet again.
I step through the inset door and I don’t have to go very far before I come across Tommy. He’s been sat on top of an oil drum, his back leaning against the wall. He looks very relaxed and that is because his throat has been cut by someone who didn’t intend coming back for another try. The gash is much wider than the wide smile that Tommy used to wear. I look at him for a moment or two then I turn away and begin to walk back towards the inset door, when from upstairs there is the sound of the telephone ringing. I turn back and race up the open stairs and cross the room and pick up the receiver. It’s Audrey, and immediately I realise that something is up because she’s stone-cold sober.
“Don’t come back,” she says. “They’ve been here looking for you.”
I know better than to ask who. It was only a matter of time before Old Bill started doing the rounds with his collection box.
“In that case I’ll phone you back,” I say and put the phone down again. I go downstairs and as I pass Tommy I notice that he’s slipped a little and instead of being upright he’s now at an angle of forty-five degrees.
I step through the inset door and out into the rain. There is some activity down the alley where the fallen heavy lies. A woman in an apron is kneeling by him looking up into the face of a man wearing a white mac over a shirt and slacks and with carpet slippers on his feet. My emerging from the garage causes the woman to turn her gaze on me and she points at me and the man in the mac turns to face me. The woman says something to him and for a moment he just stands there looking at me and then he begins to take a few tentative steps in my direction but by the time he’s started moving I’m already in the driver’s seat of the Rover and as I reverse away from the scene it’s like the final tracking shot in an Italian movie, the posed trio in the rain as it sweeps over the cobbled alley, even down to the monotonous sound of the windscreen wipers gutting through the damp quietness.
I back into the main road and then I point the Rover east and take the first left turning I come to and for the next ten minutes I drive through deserted streets of terraced houses until I find a pub with a car park at the back. I know that by now I’m only a street or so away from another main road which is handy because the pub is advertising lunch time food and in this kind of area you don’t do regular nosh unless you have regular customers, so I won’t be walking into an empty bar only ten minutes away from two corpses.
I drive into the car park. There are four other cars dotted about the windswept concrete. I point the Rover at a highbrick wall and slow down and stop and take out my cigarettes and light up and stare at the blank wall in front of me.
The rain begins to come down even harder and bounces off the bonnet of the Rover, each exploding raindrop like a glowworm in the midday gloom.
The present problem is to avoid being pulled by Old Bill so that I can carry on trying to get to Jimmy Swann. And to do that I don’t want to be dodging Old Bill all round the suburbs. I need a base to wor
k from since I can’t go back to the club or my flat. Con’s place is out because I don’t know where the Christ he is and in any case Old Bill will be looking out for him as well and the same applies to most of my other associates. And those to whom it doesn’t apply won’t appreciate my appearing on their doorstep and rowing them in. Hotels are right out, in London at any rate, and I haven’t the time to work from outside. And as I think about the time, I stretch out my arm and look at my watch and as I do that for some reason I pay attention to my cuff link as it winks in the open light and then I realise why I’m paying attention to it and I also realise that I’ve just sorted where I’m going to stay.
I get out of the car and run across the car park and round to the front of the pub and push open the fogged glass door. Inside, it’s clear that the pub used to be split into two or three bars, but the brewery’s done the usual and the pub is all one bar, circular, with a pink laminated plastic top and plastic wrought ironwork making pointless divisions. The pub’s about half full and what atmosphere there is is full of cigarette smoke and the smell of damp overcoats. I go to a part of the bar which isn’t too close to the hot plates where the bowls of shepherd’s pie are festering away and then I spend the next five minutes trying to attract the landlady’s attention. She’s got platinum hair and lips that don’t conform to her idea of them, judging by the way she’s drawn them on. When she finally decides to let me catch her eye she shuffles over and looks at me and waits for me to tell her what I want. I tell her I want a large vodka and tonic but I shouldn’t have bothered because it takes her another five minutes to go to the stockroom and find a new bottle to replace the empty one on the optic. And after all that business she gives me a glass that is too small to put in enough tonic to dilute the vodka, so I have to ask for a larger glass and that causes an even greater upheaval because she’s actually got to take one that’s lying in soak and find a dishcloth and dry it and when she’s done that she has to go to the trouble of pouring the vodka from one glass to another. And when it’s all sorted out and I ask if she’s got the number of a local minicab firm that puts the tin hat on it. She looks at me as if I’ve asked her to show me her knickers. Then she gives a sniff fit to displace her stays and she turns away and reaches behind the till and puts a card face down on the counter and moves away as if she’s trying to avoid a bad smell. I turn the card over and it says Reliance Cabs, and underneath that is printed the number. I look round the pub and see that the pay phone is on the stairs that lead up to the living quarters. I cross the bar and dial the number and I tell them I’m at the Mason’s Arms and they tell me that they’ll be there in five minutes so I go back to my drink and down it and have the effrontery to order another one which takes twice the time to serve up but that doesn’t really matter because of course the cab doesn’t arrive for over a quarter of an hour. The driver appears in the doorway and looks round the pub for his client. He’s in his late twenties and he’s wearing a three-button sports shirt and an ocher-coloured cardigan, with narrow trousers from an old mohair suit. I raise my hand and he comes over to the bar and I down the remains of my drink and he shows his disappointment at not getting a free one. I set my glass down and walk over to the door and the driver follows behind me.
It’s still raining. The cab is an old Zephyr and it’s parked halfway up the pavement. The driver tells me I can sit in the front if I like but I open the rear door and get in the back.
The driver starts the car and says, “Where was it, Chief?”
“Marble Arch tube station,” I tell him.
The Zephyr pulls away from the curb and there is silence for a minute or two until the driver tunes the radio into a pirate station. When he gets to the main road and starts going down the hill he manages to get all the lights. While we’re standing at one of the crossroads, a patrol car swings across our bonnet and screeches past us in the direction we’ve just come from.
“Cunts,” the driver says.
I don’t say anything.
“Bleeding pigs,” he says.
I light a cigarette. “Oh, yes?”
“Bleeding done me last week that one, didn’t he? Speeding. Well, I don’t have a license these days, do I? He knows me so I reckon he’s after a drop so I put it to him and he only fucking ’as me for that too, doesn’t he? Well, it’s obvious he wants a heavy one, so when I get off that evening I go down the pub near the station where they all hang out and I say to a couple of them I’m well in with, ‘That tall blond copper in the patrol car, how much is it to get to him,’ and they shake their heads and they say, ‘No way; there’s no way you can get to him, he’s straight. Ask any of the lads.’ I can’t fucking believe it so I say to them, ‘Come on, what’s he worth, a century, a couple of centuries, what?’ And they shake their fucking heads again and give me the same story, the grinning bastards.”
The lights change and he puts his foot down.
“I mean,” he says, “you wouldn’t fucking credit it, would you?”
I catch sight of his eyes in the driving mirror waiting for some reaction from me so I shake my head in disbelief.
“Yeah,” he says. “Fucking fuzz. Take my advice. Never get involved with the fuzz because you never know where you are with the devious bastards.”
In the words of the prophet, there’s no answer to that one.
--
The Fountain of Youth
When the cab drops me off at Marble Arch I walk round the back of the Cumberland and up Seymour Place until I get to Crawford Street. In the daylight the pub is an even dirtier yellow and as I go up the steps in the passageway by its side the smell of urine is just as strong as it was the night before.
I reach the first landing and press the bell to flat number 4. At first I think she’s out because three or four minutes pass without anything happening and I’m just about to press the bell again when the door opens and she’s standing there looking at me with her mouth wide open. She’s wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a black polo-neck sweater and tight white trousers and her hair is pulled back from her face and tied in a bow at the nape of her neck. Then the initial shock passes away from her and she begins to go into the slamming-the-door-in-my-face routine but I’m expecting that and I’m through the door and past her before she can finish the trick.
“You bastard, you’ve got—” she begins but I cut her off by saying, “I know you probably feel like enjoying yourself and getting all the mileage you can out of the situation, but that pleasure will have to wait unless you want a couple round the earhole. All right?”
As I’m telling her this I walk through to where the drinks are and pour myself one and sit down on one of the Swedish chairs. She follows me through and stands by the screen and begins to open her mouth again.
“All right?” I say.
Her mouth closes.
I take a sip of my drink and pick up the phone that’s on the glass table and dial the Skinner’s Arms and Danny Hall the landlord picks up the receiver at the other end. “Danny, it’s Jack,” I tell him. “Now what I want you to do is to send one of the lads over to the club and fetch Gerald’s old lady over to yours and I want to ask her to wait by the phone because I’ll be calling her there in half an hour from now. That all right?”
Danny tells me that it is and I put the phone down and I have another sip of my drink and I look at Lesley who hasn’t taken her eyes off me all the time I’ve been on the phone.
“Why don’t you have a drink?” I ask her. “It’s pretty good stuff. Better than what you usually get in a place like this.”
She carries on looking at me and although there are many things she would like to say and do she manages to keep herself under control.
I finish my drink and get up and make myself another one and while I’m doing that she says, “I suppose I’m not going to get to know what’s going on.”
“Came back for my cuff link, didn’t I?”
She begins to go red and this time she won’t be able to stop herself.
I can’t be doing with any of that so I say, “About that phone call, incidentally. I said what I said for a reason. Without going into the ins and outs of it, I had to make it seem as if I didn’t want to talk to you. For business reasons. I couldn’t phone you back and explain because I didn’t know your number so I thought I’d come round instead.”
She goes over to the door that leads into the hall and throws it open and starts screaming and yelling at the top of her voice. “Clear out, you lying bastard, what do you bleeding well think I am?”
I down my drink and go over to her and give her one round the earhole that sends her glasses flying and I close the door. Then I haul her over to the chaise longue and sit her down and sit down next to her.
“All right,” I tell her, “I’ll stop fucking about. I’ve come to stay here for a couple of days. Not out of choice, out of necessity. And you’re going to like it, not because you like me, but because I say you’re going to like it. And nobody else is going to know anything about it, are they? Purely because you’re a clever little girl and you’ve got a vivid imagination and I don’t have to put it plainer than that, do I?”
She’s lost her colour now, except for the spot on the side of her face where I fetched her one. I look at her and she looks at me and then she shivers, just once, the whole length of her body. So now that’s sorted out I get off the chaise longue and go through into the dining part and pour another drink and sit down by the telephone and unbutton my jacket and light another cigarette. She stays out of sight on the chaise longue and there is a heavy silence which goes perfectly with the gloom of the wet afternoon light that is drifting in through the tall windows. The silence and the tone of the room begin to give me the creeps so I lean across and switch on the table lamp but all that does is to throw the room’s shadows into deeper, darker relief and after a minute or two I switch off the light. I look at my watch and there’s quarter of an hour to go before I said I’d contact Audrey. I get up and find an ashtray and take it back to the table and sit down again. There is still no sound or movement from behind the other side of the screen.
