Angel City (5 page)

Even Springsteen kept out of the way, sensing my mood – or, more probably, my bank balance. Once the cans of cat food started to appear more regularly thanks to Bassotti's pay packets, then I saw him maybe twice a day for a snack, calling in from wherever he'd been to wherever he was going.

After the third trip, I didn't hear from Tigger for a couple of days, and then an old mate called Bunny rang and asked if I fancied a few nights jamming at a club in the West End where they were trying to introduce Merengue music as the latest dance craze. I dusted off my faithful old B-flat trumpet, swilled water through it, spat out a couple of scales and made a mental note to buy some new lip-salve as the tube in the trumpet case could now double as sandpaper. Then I rang Bunny back and said sure, where and how much and, by the way, what the fuck was Merengue music anyway?

Merengue turned out to be the Dominican Republic's version of salsa, only less structured. That meant the brass section (Bunny on alto sax and me as two out of a seven-piece total) could do as much or as little as they liked, and so could the dancers.

The club, off Oxford Street, was a flash place, but quality flash, no tat. The owner was an Iranian with money and no hang-ups about the Ayatollah, the Koran or the price of oil. He wandered around the club spreading bonhomie and free samples of Iranian caviar on triangles of toast in equal proportions. Halfway through the set he insisted the band tried some of his world-famous collection of vodkas. I stuck with the lemon vodka but Bunny went straight in the deep end with the Bison-grass vodka followed by a Polish over-proof vodka that had been flavoured with brandy to tone it down. Almost immediately, the seven-piece band became a sextet, but the dancers didn't seem to notice and Bunny didn't seem to care.

It was after two in the morning when I left carrying Bunny's saxophone case as well as my horn. Despite advanced numbness of most nerve endings brought on by the vodka-flavoured Bison (his words) he'd been drinking, he'd scored with a teenage brunette who said she was ‘in publishing'. I didn't believe it as, for a start, her clothes smacked of so much money she obviously didn't have to work, and from her conversation, she had obviously never read a book in her life. Well, not one without pictures. Come to think of it, she could have been in publishing. Then again, she might have said she was in polishing. I wasn't paying much attention and I didn't really fancy her friend anyway.

One of the club's dinner-jacketed bouncers nodded to me as I left.

‘You Angel?' he grunted, without moving his lips or unfolding his arms.

‘I can get a message to him,' I said cheerfully. It's best to be reasonably honest with people like that.

‘Friend of yours been waiting outside for an hour or so.'

He smirked the way doormen can get away with smirking.

Tigger was sitting on Armstrong's bonnet. He was wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans and was shivering. He rubbed his upper arms with his hands to keep warm.

‘Bastards wouldn't let me in,' he said sulkily.

‘Good. I'll put my name down for membership immediately. What are you doing here?'

‘I rang you. Bassotti had a load on tonight but it's too late now. How about tomorrow? Meet at the Grapes again, in Rimmer Road?'

‘When?' I asked suspiciously, remembering the ‘Gay Karaoke Night' signs and the fact that tomorrow was Thursday.

‘Closing time, out front?'

‘Deal. How did you know I was here?'

‘A real snotty bint answered your phone. Knew all about this gig and loved the sound of her own voice.' Fenella. She'd taken the original message from Bunny. I must have words with her one day.

‘That your bit on the side, then?' Tigger pushed it as I dumped the instruments in the back of Armstrong. ‘Or should that be your bit on the front as you heteros call it?' I climbed into Armstrong and started him up. Tigger slid off the bonnet and tried the back passenger door.

‘Hey! It's locked. I wanted a lift.'

He chased me out on to Oxford Street, but the lights were with me and by the time I got to Oxford Circus he had vanished from my mirror.

 

The next night, he apologised before climbing into the back of Armstrong.

‘Angel, I was well out of order last night.'

‘That you were.'

From inside the pub came the amplified karaoke version of someone giving ‘My Way' what for. Why was it always ‘My Way' when it got to closing time?

‘Is Tigger forgiven?' he came on, little-boy-lost.

‘Some of us don't have all night, you know.' It was Bassotti, moving uncomfortably from one foot to the other beside his Sierra. He had the collar of his jacket turned up, and even in the dark I could see his eyes blinking nervously. A neon sign flashing ‘Drug Dealer' above his head might have made him look slightly less suspicious.

‘Bert,' I acknowledged him and moved to kill the engine.

Bassotti dangled a set of keys in front of me.

‘I can't hang about tonight. Tigger knows where the van is. Do the business and leave it where you found it. Flea-brain there can drop the keys off tomorrow.'

‘If that's the way you want it.' I pocketed the keys.

From the back, Tigger was drumming on the rumble seat behind me with the palms of his hands, rapping: ‘Let's go go go go, on the road with this show show show …'

Bassotti looked at him wearily and slowly shook his head.

‘You can't get the staff these days,' I said, but if he found it funny he wasn't telling.

He turned and walked away, hands in pockets, but he didn't stop by the Sierra, he went diagonally across the car park. Ignoring the entrance to the pub, he disappeared behind a couple of parked cars, then I saw the glimmer of an interior light flick on and off and a door slammed.

‘Go go go …' Tigger chanted from the back, but once we were out on the street, he stopped drumming and kneeled on the rumble seat so he could shout in my ear.

‘The van's in Whitechapel, but there's no need for us to trek down to Creekmouth. I've found us a new dump site. Just the job. We can be done in five minutes and up West.'

‘Does Bassotti know about this?'

‘What he don't know can't aggravate his ulcers, can it?'

‘Hey, I'm new on the payroll. Is it good policy to cross the boss this soon?'

‘Relax. What makes you think he's the boss anyway? You'll get the same pay for ten per cent of the driving and I do all the heavy lifting again. Can you resist an offer like that?'

No. But I should have done.

 

 

 

 

 

The lock-up wasn't a lock-up this time. The white Transit van was simply parked at the side of one of the small streets off Stepney Way at the back of the old London Hospital in Whitechapel.

‘Mile End Road as far as Stepney Green, then hang a left on to Globe Road.'

‘Where are we going?' I asked, not trusting his sense of direction.

‘It's called Globe Town,' Tigger said, and I noted he was biting his lower lip.

‘I know there's a place called Globe Town, but nobody goes there. You might go through it to get to somewhere else, but there's nothing there to stop for.'

‘Exactly,' said Tigger.

He had done his homework, I had to give him that. He knew which side-road to take once we had turned off Globe Road on to Roman Road, and which even smaller road to take off that. In fact, if Tigger hadn't been with me to point it out, I would have missed the entrance to the junkyard altogether.

‘This is it. Go on, go in, it's okay.'

I had stopped to let the van's lights play on a pair of wide open double gates. One gate was resting off its hinges, the other bore the faded, hand-painted legend: HUBBARD'S YARD. I began to make out the pyramid shapes of piles of rusting car bodies organised in two lines; a scrap metal Valley of the Kings.

‘Go on, then,' urged Tigger. ‘Drive in and straight through.'

‘Tigger,' I started patiently, ‘this is somebody's yard, their place of business. Somebody works here, which means there are things worth nicking, which means they don't leave places like this undefended.'

‘There's nobody here, I'm sure.'

‘Then they'll have left a Doberman or a couple of pit bulls running around loose.'

‘No dogs. No Dobermans, no pit bulls. Promise.'

‘Not even an Alsatian with an attitude?'

‘Not even a tomcat with an attitude.'

That didn't exactly inspire me with confidence, but he couldn't know why.

‘Honest, I've sussed this place out. Anything worth having away is in the workshop, and that's locked. Anyway, we're just driving through. Straight ahead and you come out on wasteland.'

‘Down by the canal.' He looked surprised at that.

‘You know where we are, then?'

‘Roughly. We've just come through Bethnal Green and that' – I pointed to our right and up, where a stream of orange lights marked a last train heading for home – ‘is the railway line into Liverpool Street, and it goes over the Grand Union Canal somewhere round about here.'

‘It took me days to find this place,' he said sullenly. ‘But I have checked it out. Really. There's no one home.'

‘Okay, then,' I said, finding a gear, ‘but just remember, I don't get out of the van.'

I moved the van into the yard less out of reassurance from Tigger than concern that even in a forgotten cul-de-sac, just sitting there with the engine running made us look suspicious.

There was a well-worn track between the two lines of heaped junked cars but I took it slowly, not wanting the Transit to hit a pothole or burst a tyre and end up adding to the accumulated dead weight of scrap. The effect of our lights hitting jagged edges of metal that had once been smooth and lovingly polished family pride-and-joy was weird. The cars were piled five or six high and the top ones leaned over at crazy angles. Most had doors and wheels missing. They were stacked as if on special offer on the shelves of a gigantic supermarket.

The avenue of wrecks ended to reveal waste ground sloping away in front of us and, to our left, a large windowless brick building with sliding doors big enough to admit a truck. They were firmly secured by three sets of hasps and padlocks on a scale that wouldn't have been out of place in the Disney version of
Jack and the Beanstalk.

It was then that the floodlights came on and if I hadn't been busy trying to crash my way into reverse gear, I would have strangled Tigger.

‘What's the matter?' he yelled at me as the gear stick screeched and began to fight back. ‘Keep moving. You've just tripped the burglar lights, that's all.'

‘That's all is it? Well, stroll bloody on. We're leaving.'

‘They're just to frighten off the kids, they're not connected to an alarm or anything.' He had a hand on my hand on the gear stick. In some countries that meant marriage.

‘And what about those, you airhead?'

I wrenched my hand free and pointed to the two remote video cameras now clearly visible above the sliding doors. They were not the moving sort that follow you around in high security buildings, but fixed to brackets on the wall. Each had a glowing red light just above the lens.

‘Aw, come on, get real,' drawled Tigger. ‘They're not even pointing this way. Look, Bassotti's got them all over his place. They cost £19.29 each, with batteries. They're fakes, man. They're just there for decoration, for fuck's sake. Relax will yer? The lights go off after a minute. Trust me.'

Trust me
.
Now those really should go down as classic Famous Last Words, along with ‘Don't tell
me
how to change a fuse, woman.'

I found first gear and the van leapfrogged forward out of the glare of the floodlights, and its own lights picked up a tower of rusting oil drums and more wrecks too far gone to be recognisable, with grass and weeds growing up between the skeletons of metal. We were bouncing now, over rough waste ground, the headlamp beams picking up tussocks of grass and small bushes. I swung the van in a slowing arc so I could turn and head back out. As we came round, the floodlights in the scrap yard went off and Tigger said: ‘Told you so.'

I stopped the van but kept the engine running, as if that was what I'd intended to do all along.

‘This do you?'

‘Okey-dokey,' he chirped and climbed out after unclamping his hands from the dashboard where he'd hung on as I'd bounced us around.

I heard him open the rear doors and grunt as he hefted the first two bags. He was gone for about 30 seconds before he picked up the next. Over the sound of the engine I could only imagine I heard the occasional splash.

To my left, another train rattled out of Liverpool Street with only the odd passenger slumped in silhouette against the lit windows. In front of me, beyond the yard, a block of flats showed lights at almost every window. Any one of them could have offered a view of what we were doing.