by Dan Kavanagh
‘Mine’s still a virgin on the rocks,’ a familiar voice whispered in his ear at the Alligator three months later. ‘Where’ve you been, Sir Duffy?’
Duffy signed at the waiter, and interpreted.
‘Tomato juice, lots of ice.’
‘Oh well, old thing, if you’re buying …’ Eric retained the waiter with a flick of the eyebrow. ‘Dunk a couple of vodkas in it while you’re about it.’
‘No, you’re paying,’ said Duffy, stubborn about being taken in by that sort of trick.
‘God, you don’t guard cash transfers for nothing, do you?’ Eric gave a theatrical groan. ‘Anyway, I’ll come straight to the point.’
‘No,’ said Duffy. ‘I said not again, didn’t I?’ Why did people always think No meant Yes, soon?
‘Wait. Waity-wait. Job. Want a job?’
‘Maybe.’
‘That’s why I’ve been looking for you.’
‘I’m in the book.’
‘Yes, but it’s much more fun sitting here being bought a drink than talking to your secretary down the phone, isn’t it?’
Duffy let one of the two remarks pass, but picked up on the other.
‘You’re still buying.’
‘A friend of a friend … is having a little trouble.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ There was something about the pallid face and the buoyant manner which irritated Duffy. Be one or the other, he thought.
‘Always a little tart, eh?’ (Duffy let that one pass too.) ‘A little thieving seems to be going on at his establishment.’
‘There’s this quite useful branch of the civil service they’ve set up, you know. It’s called the police.’
‘Well, obviously he has his reasons.’
‘What are they?’
‘It’s a small establishment – half a dozen or so employees. Good relationship all round, just happens to be one rotten apple. Now if he went to the police they’d come clumping in with their great boots, stir everything up, put everyone under suspicion, wouldn’t they?’
‘They might stop the stealing.’
‘So he thought, get someone private in, let him sniff around. Can’t do any harm, can it?’
‘No. It can only cost money. Why did you suggest me?’
‘Well, you run a security firm, don’t you?’
‘That’s not how you know me.’
‘No, but we must stick together, mustn’t we?’
Ah, thought Duffy: gays as the new masons – is that what’s happening? Would he have to learn a new handshake soon? He was irritated. Once you didn’t need solidarity, you resented its offer.
‘Tell me more.’
‘His name’s Hendrick. He runs a transport and storage business out of Heathrow. He’s been losing rather more stuff than he cares for lately.’
‘How would he explain me? I’m not much good leaning on a mop.’
‘One of his men just had a car crash. He’ll be off for some time.’
‘Convenient. What do I do?’
‘He’ll tell you.’
‘I charge …’
‘Duffy,’ Eric cut in, ‘I’m not a fucking broker. You fix that up with him. I don’t care what you earn. You want the job, go and see him.’ Eric was annoyed. First Duffy acted as if he expected to be raped; then he got all uppity. Eric scribbled on the top of a newspaper. ‘This is his London office. Ring up, say you’ve called about the papaws.’
‘The what?’
‘The papaws. As in fruit. Tropical. It’s a code, Duffy. It’s not a good idea, we thought, for you to ring up and say you’re calling about sorting out the thefts.’
‘I get.’
‘I hope so.’ Eric began to slide off his barstool. He felt he’d been misjudged. He certainly hadn’t taken Duffy’s No to mean Yes, soon. He’d only taken it to mean Perhaps, in a bit.
‘Oh, two things.’
‘Yes?’
‘Who’s your friend?’
‘ …?’
‘The friend who’s the friend in “a friend of a friend”.’
‘Oh, it’s not relevant.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he hasn’t been stealing from his friend’s firm, that’s why. And what’s the second thing?’
‘Oh – don’t go without paying for the drinks.’
Duffy sat opposite Roy Hendrick in an office the size of a bus shelter just off the Euston Road. His secretary had a room the size of a large refrigerator. Hendrick didn’t seem very comfortable. Perhaps he wasn’t that familiar with his office – perhaps it was only here for tax reasons, or to impress customers by appearing to show a London end to the business. Or perhaps Hendrick was uncomfortable for some other reason; maybe he was lying to Duffy. Clients often did.
Hendrick, a fleshy, saturnine man with dirty blond hair and a flapping suit which might just have been handed on from someone else, explained the problem.
‘I’m not an angel, Mr Duffy, and I don’t expect other people to behave like angels. It’s just that there are limits.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘If you get the removers in, when you shift house, you expect to lose a bit, don’t you? I mean, if you’re sensible, you pack up the stuff you really care for and take it yourself, and then don’t get too surprised if you suffer a small attack of removers’ perks in the course of the job. That’s the way it is, isn’t it?’
‘If you say so.’ The only removers Duffy had ever come across had been burglars. At his last flat he’d been burgled twice: the second time, they’d taken everything, his pile of sixpences and his electric kettle included; they’d even taken his pot plant. He’d been left with a few ashtrays, a bed and a carpet. That scarcely warranted hiring a pantechnicon when he moved flats.
‘Well, the freight business is rather the same. You expect to lose a bit if you ship by air. It goes through so many hands, has to be opened by customs – well, there are more temptations than Adam ever had, if you follow the expression.’ (Duffy didn’t look a bookish fellow to Hendrick.) ‘And you know what they say about Heathrow?’ Hendrick paused. It was clear from Duffy’s expression that he didn’t know what they said about Heathrow. ‘No one who works there ever needs to buy fresh fruit and veg. They tell me there’s scarcely a greengrocer within miles. Anyone around there who catches his wife trying to buy a pound of apples or whatever practically has her committed on the spot.’
Hendrick stared at Duffy, inviting vague complicity towards the opposite sex. Duffy looked blank. Hendrick stared briefly at the gold stud in Duffy’s left ear. He felt like giving it a tweak, if only to make the man say something. Eventually Duffy did speak, if reticently.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘What do you mean by uh-huh?’
‘You’ve been losing apples, is that what you’re saying?’
‘No. Well, yes, sort of, but that’s beside the point. I’ve been running the business for five years. Always accepted a certain percentage of pilfering. There’s almost an unspoken agreement at times: it helps them bump up their wages, I charge it to the insurance and turn a blind eye. Not worth going into.’
‘But recently …’
‘But recently, about once a month or so, it’s got out of hand: a really big dip. Something I can’t go along with.’
‘Like?’
‘Caseload of calculators. Half a dozen furs. Two crates of smoked salmon.’
‘You carry only luxuries?’
‘Not really. We freight a pretty mixed bag; bit of everything. But you don’t shift stuff by air unless it’s valuable, or perishable, or has to be shipped quickly because of the state of the market. We don’t get many crates of garden furniture or dried pigfeed, if that’s what you’re asking, no.’
‘So how do you get me in?’
‘You can take McKay’s place. Poor old McKay,’ Hendrick added, as if confirming compassion; but the repetition made it seem artificial (and perhaps it had never been very sincere in the first place). ‘Nearly wrote himself off. Did
write his car off. Very nice car.’ In the last comment at least Hendrick was indubitably sincere.
‘What do I do?’
‘Bit of everything: we’re a small firm. Everyone mucks in. Bit of driving, bit of humping things about, bit of helping Mrs Boseley.’
‘ …?’
‘Oh, she runs the shed for me. First-class woman, keep you on your toes.’
‘Wears furs a lot, does she?’
Hendrick looked up, the saturnine face pulling itself lethargically into an expression of shock. Before it got there, Duffy flashed an uncommon smile. ‘Just a little joke, Mr Hendrick. Have to ask, don’t we?’
‘You report to her as soon as you can start. Tomorrow?’
‘The day after. I charge twenty-five a day.’
‘Yes, well that’s about what McKay was getting, so that’ll be all right.’
‘No, that’s on top of McKay’s salary. If I’m doing two jobs I want two paypackets.’
They haggled. As usual, Duffy opened firmly, then lost a bit of interest and ended up conceding enough to make him feel cross with himself afterwards. Still, he was getting one and a half times his going rate, and he wouldn’t mind shifting a few sacks now and then. Especially if that included not going to the greengrocer’s for a few weeks.
2
‘UP THE BUM?’ REPEATED Duffy incredulously.
‘Up the bum.’
Duffy’s sphincter tightened involuntarily. Willett kept his smile within himself; funny how that always got to them. He went on,
‘Four up the back, three up the front. Or it may have been the other way round. Not that it makes much difference. Nice girl, too. Well, niceish – you know, posh as usual. Time was, of course, when any bit of posh would go straight through, or give you the sharp edge if you dared to ask her if you could possibly examine that tiny valise’ (he pronounced it in a mimsy, fake-upper-class way) ‘which just happened to have fifteen furs poking out of the side. Nowadays, a bit of posh, travelling alone, bit unsteady on her feet, and we know the full story before she’s even started telling us. These girls, think they’re so grown-up, go off round the world, meet this ebse-lutely sweeeet Persian, or Arab, or something, fall for him – sometimes he’s fed her a bit of coke, but often not, they do it for love nearly all the time – and before they know where they are they’re teetering off the plane with half a dozen condoms of heroin up them. Well if you’ve had that up you for, what, say, twelve hours, you know about it, don’t you? And some of these poor girls – these foreign gents they fall for aren’t stupid, I mean they know we watch planes from the obvious places, so they make them do great detours round the world before fetching up here – some of these girls have had half a dozen up them for thirty-six hours. I mean, they look as if they’ve just got off a horse. Silly stuffers.’
‘That what they’re called?’
‘Stuffers – yes. Silly girls. Lots of them are quite sweet. “What will Memmy say … And Abdul – I did so adore him.” Silly stuffers. And of course we never do get the Abduls. Sometimes they send someone to ride shotgun with the girls – make sure they don’t have a bright idea and dump it all down the toilets on the plane.’
‘So who gets it out?’
‘Eh?’
‘Who searches them – the stuffers?’
‘Up there? No, it’s not on. You have to wait for it to come out. I mean – it’s an assault against the person or whatever. We can strip-search them, but we can’t probe. Thou shalt not probe.’ Willett let his smile come out this time.
‘So what do you do?’
‘Whip them down the special stuffers’ toilet.’
‘ …?’
‘It’s a room we put them in when we think they’re stuffing. Bed, couple of chairs, and at one end this toilet on a sort of throne. Raised up, looks quite posh. The bowl has a plastic lining, like what the wife puts in the pedal bin. I mean, it’s obvious what we’re there for: the toilet’s the sort of central feature of the room, and anyway we usually tell them what we suspect. And then one of us just sits there and waits for them to get on with it. After all, if they want to prove they’re not stuffers, there’s an easy way, isn’t there? Bit smelly, but easy.’
‘How long do you have to wait?’
‘Oh, days, sometimes. The trouble is, you can’t take your eyes off them either. If you nod off you know what they’ll do.’ Duffy didn’t. ‘They shit it out and then swallow it again.’
Duffy gulped, and gazed queasily at his chocolate éclair.
‘They do that?’
‘If it’s that or seven years, I reckon you might bite the bullet.’
Duffy reckoned so too, though he didn’t care to give the choice very much thought.
‘It must be boring, all that waiting.’
‘Well, it is. If we were in Hong Kong or somewhere like that, we could give them Ex-Lax in their coffee and then Bob’s yer uncle. But not here – that’d be another assault, giving them the Ex-Lax. So we just have to wait, and we hold them as long as it takes. And then when they finally see they can’t leave without first being excused, it’s on with the rubber gloves, clothes-peg on the nose, and think of England.’
‘You sure there’s nothing in this coffee?’
‘Just a little persuader or two. You see, I want you to take these packages of fruit-gums out to Baghdad.’ Willett grinned. He rather fancied finishing off Duffy’s éclair for him. ‘Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the record for a sniffer is fifty-five. Includes back and front, of course. And the record for a swallower is 150. That’s one thing you won’t find in the Guinness Book.’
Duffy grinned back at him. Willett was a nice old boy; well, not that old – fiftyish. His hair was thinner now than when they had first met, but he was still the same stocky, crease-faced, garrulous old bugger Duffy remembered. He had the face of your best friend’s favourite uncle – which was perhaps why he was such a good customs officer. You couldn’t lie to your friend’s favourite uncle: or if you did, you felt so guilty that it showed. Willett had been a senior officer since Duffy had first come across him in the line of business; and he’d been in the service long enough to still think of himself by the abandoned but cherished title of Waterguard.
They were sitting over coffee in Terminal One’s Apple Tree Buffet. Behind Duffy’s back was the excuse for the name: a dead tree, fifteen feet high, decorated all over with red and green fairy balls. Above his head the main departure board occasionally rattled out the summonses of the afternoon; the same information was repeated here and there on pairs of television screens. Every thirty seconds or so an instruction boomed calmly over the public address, and teas were abandoned half-drunk. ‘Final call’ was a popular phrase in these parts: it rang in Duffy’s ears like a memento mori. He bet there were retired pilots who named their sunset bungalows ‘Final Call’.
Only Willett’s presence prevented Duffy giving way to medium-grade paranoia. He hated airports. He hated planes too. Both, doubtless, because he hated Abroad. He didn’t hate foreigners – at least, not more than most people – but he did hate where they came from. Duffy had never been abroad, of course, but he knew without going that some form of craziness would be bound to strike over there. And so he hated everything that reminded him of the ease with which this dreadful fantasy could be made real. The sight of planes in the sky made him duck; a British Airways bus cruising harmlessly along the Cromwell Road filled him with anxiety. He didn’t even like meeting stewardesses – he felt in some obscure way that they might kidnap him, and he’d wake up gagged and bound in the cargo hold of a nose-diving DC-10. And that was another thing about planes: they crashed; they killed you. If Duffy were king, all aircraft would have painted along the side of the fuselage: ‘THIS PLANE CARRIES A GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING’.
There was another thing about this place, this Heathrow. It was like being in a foreign city. People stopped being English here – even if they were English. They banged into you with cases and didn’t apologise. They pushed i
n front of you in queues. They shouted. They unashamedly expressed emotion at the departure gate. They were already competing with foreigners at being foreign. And all around there were these tiny Asian women in brown smocks: carrying trays, pushing mops, clearing ashtrays, walking gracefully in and out of the toilets. Most of them were so small they made Duffy feel full-sized; many of them struck him as quite old; they never spoke, except to each other, and then in a tongue from Abroad. The only thing that made you think it wasn’t Abroad were the signs everywhere and the unnervingly calm-voiced announcements on the public address. But even that didn’t mean you had to be in England. As a tiny Asian woman removed Duffy’s tray he realised what the place felt like: a thriving outpost of Empire, with an efficient local slave population.
‘What’s it about, Duffy?’ Willett was doing his avuncular look. That was O.K. by Duffy. He liked Willett. And in any case, customs officers didn’t count the same as stewardesses: after all, they were there – or so it felt to Duffy – to discourage people from going abroad, to make things nasty for them, vaguely to represent the disapproval of authority. Not at all like stewardesses.
‘I don’t know yet. I’m just sort of on the scout. I’ve got a job starting tomorrow in the cargo market. Bit of thieving. Don’t really know any more. Just thought I’d remind myself a bit of the place – and keep up with you, of course. I don’t have much call to come here normally.’
Willett creased his face again; he knew about Duffy’s phobias.
‘Thieving’s not much of a surprise. After all, this is Fiddle City, Duffy.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I mean, the papers, and the judges, they call it Thiefrow, don’t they? But the thieving – that’s only a small part of it. It’s Fiddle City, Duffy, this place – Fiddle City.’
