Phil had noticed no more than this when he was inside what turned out to be a miserable little newsagent’s and tobacconist’s. There was a counter with dailies and weeklies and comics and paper-backs – Westerns, they seemed to be, rather than sexy ones – and there was one of those revolving stands with picture post-cards of scraggy men and fat women working hard at corny jokes at the seaside, and behind the counter there was the sort of scraggy man that exists only on post-cards except when you find him selling them. They didn’t stop to have any dealings with this chap, but went straight through the shop to an inner room.
It was a shabby little place smelling of cats, and it throbbed faintly and disconcertingly to some sort of muffled music that didn’t sound like radio.
‘Our office,’ McLeod said with a kind of soft briskness that showed he was taking charge. ‘Make yourself at home, yes?’
Phil didn’t much feel that he wanted to do that. In fact what he felt rather strongly was that he didn’t want to touch anything. And for that matter Hannay didn’t seem to like the place either. You could see that it put him a bit out of countenance. Perhaps he was reflecting that it represented a sad decline from the fifteen-storey affair he’d run up in the City only a few weeks ago.
‘Our office in this part of the town, that is,’ he said a bit foolishly, and appeared to be looking round for some surface not too dusty to put down his gloves on. He chose the top of a large steel filing cabinet which, along with a big map on a bare wall, was the only unexpected thing in the room. ‘And it has the advantage,’ he added, ‘of adjoining one of our most vigorous – I may say healthiest – enterprises. As you will presently see.’
So that, Phil thought, was the explanation of the music. There was a sextette more or less on the premises.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I come to see it, and I’ll see it. But let’s get along.’
McLeod nodded – but at the same time raised one of his pudgy hands in a restraining gesture.
‘But first,’ he said, ‘look at the map, please. It explains what we do. It explains what we could do – with fresh capital, Mr. Tombs, no?’ He might have been, speaking about any sort of business thing. Only, every now and then, his eyes came on Phil in quick veiled calculation, and his little pointed tongue came out and licked his lips.
Phil looked at the map. It was of London, and marked on it were six red crosses and six green ones. There were red dotted lines running, some more and some less directly, from red cross to red cross. In each red cross there were stuck one or two colour-headed pins, and there were similar pins here and there on the dotted lines. In red ink, too, there were what appeared to be a lot of small intricate calculations. The green crosses were isolated, and without pins or figures.
‘The red crosses, Mr. Tombs – these are the entertainments we have established. The clubs, you understand? What in my joke I call—’
‘Yes,’ Phil said. ‘I got that one.’
‘The green crosses – they are clubs to come. It is like chain stores, Mr. Tombs, but more organisational. Much, much more organisational. There are perplexities, yes! Look at the red lines.’
Phil looked at the red lines. Most of them ran along streets. Some followed what must be the course of the Underground.
‘Communications, like?’ he asked.
‘Precisely the word, my dear Tombs.’ Hannay had chipped in, brightening a little. ‘I have no doubt that, like myself, you are an old Army man. The absorbingly interesting and intricate problems of logistics are familiar to you. It is just such problems that we have to deal with in our—um—present walk of life.’
‘Now look at the pins,’ McLeod said. He paid no attention to Hannay.
Phil looked at the pins. He was aware that the faintly throbbing music – or the whole outfit of associations and suppressed expectations with which it was tied up – was doing something to his head. He couldn’t find the pins at all interesting.
‘Audience?’ he asked. ‘Members—whatever you call them?’
McLeod shook his head - and once more gave Phil that furtive look.
‘Les girls,’ he said.
Chapter Fourteen
For a moment the phrase conveyed nothing to Phil. Then he understood.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose they’re important – seeing you live on them.’ As soon as he’d made this crack he found himself feeling rather apologetic about it. He was what you’d have to call associating with this nasty Wog, after all. There was no explanation of his being in this place now, staring at this queer map and cocking his ear at that disturbing music, that wasn’t a bit dirty as explanations go. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘The pins are show-girls, and they’re doing logistics. Kind of belly dance, perhaps. Go on.’
For a moment McLeod’s eyes narrowed on him. It was rather as if he was seeing Phil when doing tough stuff as something less promising than it looked. Then he was all the businessman again. The businessman, Phil thought – and not, like Hannay, the fake business gent. Phil was coming to have rather a liking for this bit of dirt that gave himself the decent name of McLeod. It was the kind of liking you take to a man when you’re warming up to clock him.
‘The club premises – they are nothing,’ McLeod was saying. ‘The law and the registering – that is nothing, either. And the clientele – ah, that is the least smallest headache of all, no? Never, never – never in Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Cairo – was there such a clientele as you have for the asking in London today. But always it is the girls, Mr. Tombs, that are the big, big worry. Finding the girls, getting in the girls, training the girls – all that is hard. But hardest of all—’ and McLeod tapped the map with a kind of soft angry passion— ‘is moving the girls around. The traffic, Mr. Tombs! The state of affairs that the police are permitting in the London streets – it is a disgrace and a scandal, yes? Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes a girl will be in a traffic-block. And the show waiting! It is not bearable!’
‘Perfectly intolerable!’ Hannay was clinging on still to something of the Brigadier. ‘One ought to complain to the Commissioner. One ought to have a question asked in the House. Consider, my dear Tombs, the crippling taxes we are obliged to pay – while all the time we are having our profits ticking away in taxi-cabs, or seeping out of our—um—establishments with complaints that things are going too slow. It is extremely aggravating. And I express myself mildly.’
‘The girls go round from show to show?’ Phil asked. This somehow hadn’t occurred to him.
‘Quick, quick, quick!’ McLeod said. In his pulpy way he was getting quite worked up. ‘It is the whole secret, yes? Please think, Mr. Tombs. Once a girl has done her turn – our sort of turn – there is no more interest in her. It is a psychological thing, no? There has been this excitement. It has built up and it has built up. For five minutes, for ten minutes perhaps it can hold. Then she must finish – drop what you call the last stitch, yes? – and at once it breaks, it is over. Da capo – no good. Encore – no good. As spectacle, she has been had, no? There is nothing more she can do – except pick up her things and move on.’
‘To the next show?’ Phil asked.
To the next show. And to this show another girl has arrived.’
‘If the police,’ Hannay interposed, ‘haven’t been grossly incompetent and allowed another traffic block, that is to say. The fact is that, with conditions just as they are at present, we have to cut it deuced fine.’
‘And the answer is more girls, better and quicker training, and – above all – our own fleet of fast cars.’ McLeod offered this with the firm assurance of the know-how chap that tells his fellow directors they must put their shirts on somebody’s new system of office filing. ‘A well-handled car would cut an average of five minutes off every trip.’
‘Time and motion study, like?’ Phil said. For a moment he had a disturbed vision of a line of McLeod’s girls, dressed in their skins, being trundled past what McLeod called his clientele on a conveyor belt. ‘Keep moving seems t
o be your motto. But what about dancing and the like?’ Memories of dubious reading were coming into his head. ‘Don’t your customers get a turn with them that way?’
‘No, no – nothing of that kind.’ It was Hannay who spoke this time. ‘Our resources in—um—woman-power simply won’t run to anything of the sort.’
McLeod nodded.
‘In Marseilles, yes. Even in Nice, yes. But London, no.’
‘What about that Paris lot?’ Phil asked. ‘Pig Street.’
‘Ah, the Pigalle! But to that we have a long way to go. You have heard that the English take their pleasures sadly, no? They come in, they sit, they drink, they watch, they go away again! It is morne, Mr. Tombs – but it is the money-spinner, yes?’ And McLeod laughed softly.
‘Mark you,’ Hannay said, ‘there has to be a bouncer on the spot. Occasionally, the clientele does try to get at the girls. But it is unusual. The morals of our whole enterprise – you will be delighted to know – are remarkably pure. The artistic spectacle is all. And a quick turnover, my dear Tombs – at least in one sense of the term. Although it would be open to you, I need hardly say, to explore other aspects of the enterprise yourself. There is much to be said for a certain element of personal relationship between—um—capital and labour. You will find we take a very liberal view in matters of that sort.’
‘And now look,’ McLeod said.
It was rather, Phil supposed, like being a projectionist in a cinema. He’d thought he’d be taken down into this show-place, or whatever it should be called. But instead he was taken along a corridor and into a dark room no bigger than a cupboard. And McLeod had slid back a panel in the wall and motioned him to step up to it. And there was this place like a brightly lit picture, floating a bit below him.
Pitiful, it was – peeping like this, like a kid that’s found a key-hole and thinks he’s going to learn something. But with McLeod it was no doubt just plain business sense again, since he’d do well to have a way of keeping an eye on things without making himself too prominent. The music was louder now, but Phil couldn’t see where it came from. The place was like a café or a small restaurant. And it wasn’t all that brightly lit, as he’d first thought when peering out of this nasty darkness. There was a circle of tables with coloured cloths and low lights on them. Outside that there was another circle, or half-circle, that seemed to be more tables set back in kind of alcoves, so that the people at them could do most of their seeing without being much seen. He was reminded of a prison, and he wondered why. Then he remembered a picture he’d seen of a prison chapel, with all the lags in little boxes, hollaring hymns, and with none of them seeing anybody but a chaplain getting ready to pray and that, up in a pulpit. Like that, it was.
There was a bare table in the middle, not much bigger than the others, with a kind of raised cat-walk running away from it to some curtains at the back. He couldn’t tell how many people there were in the place, but it certainly wasn’t anything near full. They weren’t talking much – rather as if they had that feeling of a chapel too – but it was clear that there was drink, since you could smell it almost as much as you could smell the tobacco smoke and the general frowst of the place. Then suddenly the music gave a blare and a spotlight flicked on at the far end of the cat-walk and the curtains had parted and a girl had come through.
Phil felt something tighten in his chest. There was nothing cheap about her, he saw in an instant – or not as what she was being sold as. She was tall and dark, and she wasn’t all that young. Her face was a haughty mask, and you could see how rich and full her body was, because she was dressed in a sheath of gold that went to her hips and then flared out in a great golden skirt. She walked straight up the cat-walk with the spotlight tracking her, and she stood quite still on the centre table, as erect as a great tree. The music had stopped, and for seconds there was a dead silence while she held this effect, dominating McLeod’s sodding clientele like she was a goddess. Then softly the music stirred, and she stirred too.
He’d heard of dancing like that, but he’d never seen it – not even anything quite like it in a film. You couldn’t see her legs or feet – not yet, you couldn’t – but you could tell it was only her heels and never her toes she ever lifted from the table. It was with all the muscles of her body she was dancing. Her whole body rippled in subtle surfaces of gleaming gold. She managed to be utterly alone in this cramped little Peeping-Tommery place. She might have been the first woman – Lilith, was it – in the first throes of procreation the world had ever seen.
The music, which seemed to be all pulse and beat and nothing more, quickened a shade – and suddenly you saw that the golden sheath had parted at the neck and arms, and that her shoulders were free. It was as if some great golden rind had begun to split and to reveal a soft incredible fruit inside. The sheath came softly down. The woman’s face remained a mask. Her body worked, and Phil felt his own breathing to be involved with it. That’s all right, he told himself tough. See Naples and die. No surprises in this mug’s game. She won’t turn out to be a mermaid when the band stops. You’ve had it, and you needn’t come again. What your auntie calls the strippers. What chaps hurry up to London to see when they’ve had a windfall of fifty pounds … Only for fifty thousand, perhaps, you can buy the lot.
He watched it to the end – which was through an eternity, and yet no time at all. And how right McLeod was. With the last stitch the spell did mysteriously snap. Where a second before there had been this high-powered erotic experience there was only a near-naked woman, exploited and tired and indifferent, picking up a bundle of soiled tinsel from her feet and walking off behind a curtain. There was some uncertain applause, like you might get at a concert the audience didn’t know was religious or not. And you felt as flat and silly as after any sodding unnatural thing.
Phil heard McLeod’s voice in the near-darkness beside him – like it might be Mephistopheles whispering to Faust.
‘It is foolish – no? – the pleasures of the voyeur. To come in, to buy champagne, to stare – it is only for the fools we take a fool’s money from. Illusion! Common day-dream, Mr. Tombs, given for five, ten minutes a little more vividness – yes? – by art. But that girl! She is real. She is putting on her street-clothes now – and that same body will be beneath them. We have twenty girls, thirty girls, like that. In six months we could have sixty. It is interesting, no?’
And Phil suddenly felt strange. He felt tired and beaten – as he’d already felt tired and beaten on some other and infinitely distant occasion that day.
‘What d’you take me for?’ he said with a desperate roughness. ‘The bleeding Bey of Algiers?’
And he followed McLeod back to the scraggy little newsagent’s nasty inner room.
Chapter Fifteen
There was another chap there with Hannay now – a hulking great tough in a stained monkey-suit like a low-class waiter’s. He seemed to have come up from the show, and Phil supposed that, among other things, he was the bouncer. He was talking angrily at Hannay, who didn’t seem to know at all what to do with him.
‘Happening all the bleeding time,’ the tough was saying. ‘Ten minutes, fifteen minutes – who wouldn’t mizzle? Worry, I’ve had it till it’s chronic.’
‘You’ve got films, haven’t you?’ Hannay asked. ‘Show them a film, man, instead of coming up here and wasting time complaining.’
‘Films? Trouble with you, Mr. Sodding Hannay, is that you don’t know your bloody onions. The films is waste of money, like I always said they were. Englishmen don’t like films—see?’ The tough, to Hannay’s obvious alarm and Phil’s satisfaction, was turning aggressive. ‘They think a dirty film’s dirty – and I don’t blame them. A girl’s natural, I say – and a girl in the altogether’s more natural still. But them things that happen on foreign films just ain’t decent, see?’ The tough was for a moment massively reasonable. ‘Take the mickey out of you and nothing to show for it. It ain’t British, and be buggered to you.’
Phil rather expect
ed McLeod to chip in. He was certain now that McLeod was the real boss. But McLeod was only looking at his watch, and then at the map with its red lines and coloured pins. What you might call a master-mind, McLeod was. Phil felt he liked him still better. He was soft, of course. But, if you gave him fair warning, it would be honest enough to get him on the jaw. It would be tempting to get him right where he was exploiting people. But the jaw would do.
‘This is outrageous!’ Hannay, although unconvincingly, was all rolled umbrella and bowler hat. ‘You know what this means, my man? It means a week’s notice.’
‘And do you know what this means?’ Pleasingly, the tough had pushed back the sleeve of his spotty dinner-jacket to reveal a dirty and hairy arm. He flexed this so that the muscles bulged like Sandow’s in the book Phil had done exercises out of as a kid. He clenched his fist and advanced it under Hannay’s nose. ‘It means ’orspital, it does.’
‘And it means jug too, if you don’t behave yourself, yes?’ McLeod had now stepped forward – but not too far forward – and was looking at the tough with cold venom. ‘The next turn will be here any time. Get back to your job, see? And hot up that rotten band.’
At this moment the door of the little room opened. Phil turned round. A young girl, just a kid, had tumbled scared and panting over its threshold.
It was from this point, Phil was to see afterwards, that it all changed for him. Now he stared at the kid, and it just seemed that she couldn’t belong to all this. She was pinched and thin, as if she hadn’t been nourished proper, and there wasn’t a curve on her that the dirtiest of McLeod’s suckers could think of putting a hand to. She was dressed poor, too, like she’d be ashamed even to walk down Gas Street. And she stood there breathing quick and terrified, and looking from one to another of these men. She looked for a second at Phil as well, and there was a flicker on her scared face, as if she didn’t rightly understand him. Then she broke into frightened speech.
The Man Who Won the Pools Page 14
