Blue Rondo

by John Lawton

Troy said nothing.

  ‘And he looks kinda crazy, doncha think?’

  ‘No,’ Troy lied. ‘And I thought we were talking about Ryan?’

  He fanned out the rest of the pack. Daniel Ryan in what looked like a London nightclub. Some with a bunch of men he did not know. One with Kitty. And one with a very familiar face – that self-publicising arrogant shit Lord Steele, husband of the ubiquitous Sylvia – formerly Ted Steele, MP for Nottingham, now a Labour apparatchik in the Lords, one of the first of the new-fangled life peers. It was a minor miracle Gumshoe had not known who he was – or did the man read no English newspapers? Ted was something of a joke to brother Rod. On his elevation he had put to the College of Arms the idea that he would take the title ‘Lord Sheffield Steele.’ This they had duly forwarded to the appropriate Lords committee. ‘But, Ted, it’s advertising. You can’t use a title to advertise a product! Besides you’re not even a Sheffield MP.’ Someone on the committee had recounted the conversation to Rod who had helpfully suggested the title of ‘Lord Fork and Spoon’ – it was marginally shorter, they made ’em in Sheffield and it was steel. In the end Ted had copped out and just turned his own surname into a title. To Troy and Rod he would always be ‘Lord Spoon’.

  ‘Your point?’

  ‘The company he keeps.’

  Troy tapped the photo. ‘Ted Spoon . . . sorry, I mean Steele. Ted Steele. Member of the Lords. Filthy rich, and a total twat, but that’s hardly a crime.’

  ‘Look at the first one of Mr Ryan.’

  Troy looked again, and failed to recognise anyone in the convivial gathering but Ryan himself.

  ‘You know these guys?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re Citizen Ryan’s kid brothers.’

  ‘They may well be. As I recall, Danny comes from a large family. I’ve never made it my business to keep au fait with the family tree.’

  Gumshoe’s lip curled like Elvis’s – part smile, part sneer.

  ‘You say he ain’t bent. OK. I might just buy that. But these two – his kid brothers – either they’re bent or I didn’t spend seventeen years in the NYPD, I don’t have flat feet, I don’t have haemorrhoids . . . Take it from me, Topcop, these guys are crooks.’

  ‘What kind of crooks?’

  ‘How in hell should I know? That’s up to you guys. Or has the East End become a no-go area for the London bobby?’

  It was a stinging comment. This flatfoot buffoon had turned the tables on him. If the Ryan brothers were bent somebody ought to know. Somebody should be au fait. But it was hardly Troy’s domain – these men might be petty criminals. The Metropolitan Police Force had its divisions for that sort of thing.

  ‘You know this place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They call it the Empress Club.’

  ‘I still don’t know it.’

  ‘One of those side streets off Bond Street. Now, correct me if I’m wrong but that’s what you’d call a classy neighbourhood, right?’

  ‘It’s what you’d call Mayfair.’

  ‘These two palookas own it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And? And that’s a hell of a lot of moolah, that’s what.’

  ‘I doubt Danny’s hard up. Perhaps he bankrolled his brothers.’

  ‘I thought of that too. But if he’s that philanthropic how come these guys had day jobs in a garage underneath railway arches in Shadwell until the spring? I asked around. They were monkeys in greasy overalls until a matter of months ago. They still put in appearances at their garage from time to time. And how come they take hundreds home in cash from their club every night and help themselves from the till like it was their personal piggy-bank? Troy, take it from me, something stinks. Somebody is folding the greenbacks away. Money is changing hands like it was juggling class. These two are rotten. I can feel it in my piss. And if they are, the odds are big brother Danny is too. And even if he ain’t it’s too close to Mrs Cormack for my comfort.’

  Troy looked again. The brothers looked to be twins. They also looked to be the best part of twenty years younger than Danny. Two big brash young men in shiny suits and an excess of Brylcreem. He didn’t know them. They could be any pair of on-the-make young tearaways of the post-war world. It seemed like only yesterday, although it was probably five years, that the city was awash in young men armed with cut-throat razors, dressed in the outlandish red and purple suits, the bungy-soled brothel creepers of the New Edwardian look. They’d been known as Teddy Boys, or Teds. It was Troy’s night for Teds. Perhaps this was what they’d evolved into. These vaguely menacing, cocksure young faces.

  ‘Now, we come back to the same question. Are you gonna tell her or am I?’

  ‘Is Kate a regular at the Empress?’ He fanned quickly through the rest of the shots. ‘You would appear to have only three, no, four shots of her out of about thirty.’

  ‘Troy, just answer the fucking question.’

  ‘It is in both our interests to see that Mrs Cormack does not become embroiled in a scandal.’

  ‘Was that a “yes”?’

  ‘That was an “I want to see for myself ”.’

  ‘You mean you’re gonna go down the Empress and spy on these guys in person and hope that the Senator’s wife doesn’t spot you in the crowd?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘OK, smartarse. How did you do it?’

  ‘Me – I’m not quite as conspicuous as you, for starters.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Troy lied.

  ‘For twosers, Mrs Cormack wouldn’t know me from Adam.’

  ‘Can’t argue there.’

  ‘And threesies, I got this from a buddy in the CIA.’ Rork took a tiny camera out of his pocket.

  ‘High-res film, no need for a flash. You can snap a guy and he’d never know.’

  ‘You know,’ said Troy. ‘I thought the trick was to have it concealed in your bow-tie.’

  ‘I ain’t wearin’ a bow-tie.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Are you pullin’ my pretzel?’

  Oh, God, thought Troy. Oh, God. Rork was about as inconspicuous as an elephant and, worse, he was an elephant who went around pointing a camera at people thinking no one would notice. That was the chilling thing about Gumshoe. You thought him a fool, then he surprised you, trounced you almost, and then he said something so dumb you thought him a fool all over again.

  § 41

  It took Troy a couple of days to find the nark he wanted. Most of the narks he’d had in his younger days knew the East End and little else. After his move to the Yard they had tended to be Soho-centred. What he needed now was someone a little more geographically and socially mobile. Someone who might occasionally venture into Mayfair.

  Shortly after the end of the war he had inherited a nark. Chief Inspector Walsh, the only officer in the Special Branch who would even give Troy the time of day, had offered him an oddity known as Fish Wally. The Branch had little further use for him, but it seemed a shame not to deploy his ears and eyes. By a coincidence Fish Wally had been recruited to the hidden profession by none other than Kitty’s father, the late Chief Inspector Stilton. However, the relationship Troy and Wally had formed was based on cash not sentiment. Over the years Troy had reached the conclusion that Wally did his cash business with quite a few people. In the last ten years Wally had been transformed from a walking ragbag in a tatty greatcoat and three-day stubble to a man who could only be described as dapper. An Aquascutum blue cashmere overcoat – it would have to be a blistering summer day before Wally would venture out without it; today was a blistering day and still he wore it – an array of Harvie and Hudson, both white and striped, shirts, shoes handmade to a last of his foot at Lobb’s – and gloves, gloves that hid his frostbitten lobster-claw hands. The gloves were always white and always put Troy in mind of a Disney character. Mickey Mouse and Goofy always wore white gloves. Like Mickey Mouse and Goofy, Wally never took them off. Wally ate wearing his gloves just as he was about to now. I
n the same greasy caff in which Troy had confronted Gumshoe for the first time. Wally turned a few heads among the working men in overalls sitting down to steak and kidney pie and chips, but he had a dignity as starched as his shirts. ‘How discerning of you, Troy. I have ever been partial to the plain fare served in this establishment by Mother Riley.’

  Mother Riley was standing over them, a bosom as big as Texas, clutching her order pad. She uttered what Troy wouldn’t: ‘I never understand a bleedin’ word ’e says. Usual, is it, Wol? The kidney puddin’? And for you, Chief Superintendent?’

  More heads turned. Two young men got up and left without ordering.

  ‘Egg and chips, no bread and butter.’

  Troy paused before asking Wally anything, knowing full well that Mother Riley’s next move would be to yell the order down the dumb waiter at deafening volume.

  When she’d finished, it was Wally who spoke. ‘What is it you want that you think we can discuss in public?’

  ‘The Empress Club. What is it and why have I never heard of it?’

  ‘You probably knew it before the war. It began life as the El Hassan in the twenties – then it was something else I do not recall. Whatever it was it was called it until about 1945, when it became The Swingtime, and that’s what it stayed until about two months ago.’

  ‘Why the change?’

  ‘Change of ownership.’

  ‘The Ryan twins?’

  ‘So I gather, but of them I know next to nothing. The club was owned by someone you may well know – Bobby Collington.’

  ‘The bandleader?’

  ‘The same. The King of English Swing, as he called himself.’

  Troy had never been to The Swingtime, but he’d heard Collington’s records. They always struck him as a milk-pudding version of the real thing – the real thing being probably the old Tommy Dorsey band – and definitely not to his taste, at least not to his taste while Duke Ellington was still around. He said as much to Wally while Mother Riley slapped the meal in front of them.

  Wally gazed down at his steaming plate silently for several seconds, his knife and fork untouched. ‘You know,’ he said, looking up at last, ‘how certain things habitually remind you of the rituals of childhood?’

  Troy nodded.

  ‘With every meal served by another hand, and this does not happen when I cook for myself, but these days I so rarely do . . . with every meal I hear my father’s voice saying grace, urging his sons and daughters to a gratitude they scarcely felt or understood. The Germans shot my father. Most of my brothers and sisters too. My Catholicism lapsed into atheism overnight. Yet still my mind recites the ritual words of thanks, and does so in his voice. I have the gratitude now, I have lost the god. How curiously we are constructed. Do you ever think of your father, Troy?’

  ‘Every day,’ said Troy tersely. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘You were telling me you had no taste for old Bobby Collington’s music. You will like the new sound of his club even less. Bobby is, I believe, a partner of the Ryans, whether he likes it or not, and the club purveys the latest jazz, which I believe is called Trad and is the height of fashion.’

  Trad, Troy thought, was rubbish. The New Orleans sound of King Oliver and Kid Ory turned into a hammy seaside pastiche – all boaters and stripy waistcoats – that scarce deserved the name of music.

  ‘What do you mean “whether he likes it or not”?’

  ‘You would not be asking me about the Empress if you did not have your suspicions. Do you really think they bought their stake in the club? I think Bobby got strong-armed. These days he hangs around looking nervous and wishing he had retired to a bungalow in Frinton-on-Sea.

  Or so I am told. I have not, you will appreciate, been to see.’

  ‘Could you find out more?’

  ‘I can always find out more. I could even talk to old Bobby, but as to what he will say . . .’ Wally let the sentence run down, forked in a good helping of kidney and mash, the godless satisfaction of gratitude lighting up his eyes.

  ‘Do you mean to look for yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘I was thinking of going tonight.’

  ‘It’s members only, but I should think a discreetly placed bribe would do the trick.’

  § 42

  Troy arrived after ten thirty, thinking this would be in the interval between sets, to find they hadn’t even started. The trick was played and a tenner did it. A six-foot, sixteen-stone plug-ugly bouncer, who cheated on his employers and saw Troy for what he was at first glance. He wondered how long it would take before the word suffused the whole club. ‘Old Bill’s in tonight.’

  ‘Anywhere?’ said the talking suit by the velvet ropes.

  ‘Side booth, quiet and shady.’

  It was an old-fashioned look – not tarted up but not shabby either. The clean, yet elaborate lines of art deco. The red and sandy colours the original designers of the El Hassan had meant to suggest Morocco or Egypt. As though the accretions of the last twenty-odd years had been peeled away. As though new management had taken over the club, ripped out half a ton of plasterboard and found a pre-war nightclub intact beneath. Troy had the vaguest memory of the place. He rather thought he’d been there some time in the 1930s when it had been known as The New Yorker or The Manhattan or something equally silly, long after it had been the El Hassan. He’d been there in ’36 or ’37 at the height of the Depression – and as that word flashed through his mind the real name of the club sprang fully fledged to memory. It had been sillier still – The Roaring Twenties, after the Bogart and Cagney film. He had not been twice. They had still played twenties music, the frenetic, tasteless pretence of the carefree . . . so out of place in an age that had cares by the million. It was a sound raucously echoing in an empty hall long after the party had ended. Perhaps 1959 was exactly the moment to reopen the club in its original form. In a mere quarter of a century we had gone from never having it to never having it so good. There might be many in Britain who had not noticed they had never had it so good, but the Prime Minister had assured us it was so. It seemed to Troy to be touch and go. (Or was it stop and go?) Make the most of it while it lasts. Given the fickle, almost neo-embryonic nature of English culture at the moment it was perfectly possible that in six months a job lot of labourers would be ushered in with a hundred sheets of pegboard to whack up and this glimpse of a lost era would be lost once more.

  From his side booth he had a good view of the centre tables and the better-lit booths nearer the band. He was looking around when the lights dimmed and the band took to the stage. A crooner’s voice said, ‘One, two, three, four’, the stage lights went up and a nine piece band in blazers striped like deckchairs struck up an ear-bendingly awful version of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. They followed this with a sousaphone-led rendition of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ that the crooner crooned through a tin megaphone. Troy wondered how long the set would last. Could he get through it without euthanasia? Yet . . . yet . . . the audience clapped enthusiastically after every number – some even whistled and yelled. What, thought Troy, as people seemed to say to him so often nowadays, is the country coming to? Many numbers on, they ended the set with the ritual slaughter of ‘Lazy River’. In so short a time he had come to think of it as Kitty’s song – it was more than slaughter, it was murder.

  When the house lights went up again, he caught sight of Kitty, clapping politely at the death of her song. And when she stopped clapping, she leaned over to Danny Ryan and whispered something in his ear. She was not looking his way. There was only one light at his table, illuminating the cocktails menu at head height. Troy reached for his hanky and twisted the hot bulb in its socket. If Kitty looked now, it was unlikely she’d see anything but an outline.

  As he looked around he saw another canoodling couple two booths further back from Kitty. Foxx, head on the shoulder of Vince Christy. A waitress stood before him and blocked his view.

  ‘Nothing, thank you.’

  ‘You gotta order summink. ’Ouse rules. Two
quid minimum.’

  ‘Water, then.’

  ‘Water don’t cost two quid, water don’t cost tuppence.’

  ‘Bring me a glass of water and I’ll pay two quid for it. Just move.’

  In the time it took to get rid of her, the empty booth behind Foxx and Christy had received two occupants. Troy began to wonder if there was a surprise the evening would not spring on him. Ted Steele, Lord Spoon as Troy knew him, and quite possibly the last face Troy expected to see in a Trad Jazz club. Tom Driberg, a maverick back-bencher from the Labour Party, and old friend of Troy’s since the war, an even older friend of his father’s and someone the very mention of whose name could provoke Rod to rage or laughter. Troy had the merest sliver of sympathy for Rod’s point of view – if you wanted your party elected to power, an unrepentant, indiscreet queer on the benches didn’t help much. Troy had had no idea Spoon and Driberg were friends. Acquaintances inevitably – Spoon sat on the Labour front bench in the Lords – but friends? Unlikely. An odd couple, even physically. Tom Driberg had never been particularly handsome, even as a young man, and in middle age seemed to have developed a striking resemblance to a sleepy dog, but somehow managed to look effortlessly upper crust (although what upper crust or elegant with effort might look like Troy had never been able to work out). Lord Steele was in good shape, far from seedy at fifty or so, tall, good-looking in that greying sort of way, and ever so faintly continental in appearance, in much the same way Troy’s brother Rod was – and almost always to be found, as he was now, puffing at a Gitane. It was only the second or third time Troy had seen the man in the flesh, rather than in one of his customary husband-as-accessory poses in the newspapers. Troy wondered about the transparent vulgarity of the man, the way he lent himself to his wife’s headlining antics, and he wondered, too, about the Sheffield Steele story. Was it apocryphal? He didn’t know the man, yet he’d taken the piss out of him for years – he’d been a joke to Troy and Rod – but that was them, when they wanted to take the piss they did it. And they were forever making up nicknames for politicians. Troy had dubbed Harold Wilson ‘Mittiavelli’, Rod had christened Nye Bevan ‘Humpty’. Steele had been ‘Spoon’ for about a year now. Might there be more to Steele than Spoon?