I Was Dora Suarez (22 page)

Rupt took him by his left ear and whispered into it: ‘What for?’

Drucker marched him out, saying: ‘Tony now.’

Rupt said: ‘Yes, let’s hear about Tony.’

‘Tony.’

‘Tony.’

I said: ‘It’s going to be a long hard night for you, Robacci.’

I picked up my photographs and left before anything else stopped me.

I went up Meard Street and round the corner into Wardour; it was a basement club called the Spiaggia di Napoli; it lay under a bankrupt dress shop called the Nth Wave. I caught sight of my face as I passed the bouncer’s mirror at an angle facing the stairs as I went down; it looked to me as though I had died a thousand years
ago. I went in past the public telephone that was always busy and said to the barman: ‘The boss in, Mario?’

‘Over on the jackpot there, top end of the bar.’

‘How’s the family?’ I said.

He said: ‘Reproducing.’

He neither trusted me nor didn’t; I was a copper with contacts both sides and that didn’t make sense to him.

Mario’s face always reminded me of a horrible case I had had years ago. It was a hard morning in winter, December, just past dawn, and two of us in a patrol car were sent by radio to this body fallen down outside Luton. It lay spread-eagled, covered in frost, at the foot of a high-tension pylon in a great field where the cables marched across carrying the electric current towards the city of Luton. The dead man’s shoulders were so wrenched by the shock when he short-circuited the terminals and killed himself that it looked as if he had somehow buttoned himself up wrong inside his grey jacket. He hadn’t. But it was a rotten jacket to die in anyway – the kind you get from national assistance that doesn’t keep the cold out. His hands had been burned away where they had gripped the cables at the top of the tower till the energy had hurled him off them. His eyes had been fried directly into fishballs; there was nothing else left of his face but his eyes in sockets that were now huge, and his glaring teeth. He had been thrown by the shock from the two hundred feet that he had patiently climbed among the girders so that he could make an end, down into that flat, endless field that bordered the motorway under a colourless sky, and so had purged himself of existence. Young as I was then, I could easily have managed his fragile relic alone, but as it was, the two of us, and the two men from the ambulance, all lifted him together. We laid him on the stretcher, having covered his face, as carefully as you place a dead match in an ashtray, and then we carried him away to the hospital there at Luton.

In the Spiaggia everyone could speak English all right, but no one ever did except at work. They were all Italian, and so Italian was the language they all spoke – waiters, cab drivers, porters,
small-time villains, dealers and gamblers seconds off the back and so on going all the way up to the hierarchy, which had not only marked out the foreign London territory but was also respected for ancestry and reputation. The young men looked after the older men not only because they were family – which was reason enough – but because they were legend; everyone knew what losses they had taken in the Soho wars. Racy old haw-haw British folk in overcoats and polka-dot ties who thought it would be fun to take their women down there after a Chinese lunch and show off with the old Positano Italian in the afternoon were told to fuck off, because everyone in the Spiaggia was oversexed and it was a club where women only started fights.

At a table in the corner by the jacks, eight men in demolition coats were playing
scopa
. They had a bottle out in front of them and the look of men who did not want to be disturbed. Coming in, I looked at the telly high up on the wall with the Kempton Park card coming up for the 3:30 and then at the gobbling row of fruit machines underneath, each with its dark young punter with a face like a stained knife blade gazing into the screen and feeling for the payoff. Mostly they were off-duty waiters from the restaurants up the street, but at the last machine to the right by the wall was the man I wanted to see, a man my own age wearing an old mac wringing the bandit’s arm with his back to me. He wasn’t alone, though. As he felt me come in a small man wearing a blue Burberry put his right hand in his pocket and turned towards me expressionlessly, only I was busy thinking, and so was unaware of him.

I went up to the older man playing the machine from behind and put my hand on his shoulder.

‘Mauro,’ I said, ‘I want to talk to you.’

The next thing I knew was that I thought I was dead, bent backwards over the bar at an impossible angle for a human spine; and the cutting edge of the short man’s right hand was an inch above my throat – meantime I just had time to see the barman filling the sink with water in case I did scream so he could dowse
me in it and send me out with the rest of the garbage. The other drinkers had their backs turned; the young dealers went on knocking and calling the bets as though nothing were happening. The man I wanted said to the man in the Burberry just in time: ‘Let this man stand up, Fabrio, let him breathe.’ He watched the machine jerk out silver intently till it had finished, picked it all up and pushed it across the bar. He said to me, meaning the man in the blue raincoat: ‘He’s new, he’s young, just in from Sicily, he don’t know a lot of folk yet, but you must be sick to come up to a man in here from behind.’

I said: ‘I suppose I am, only I’m distracted by a matter in my mind.’

‘Sure.’ said Mauro, ‘money. You’re a fired policeman and not young. How much do you need? A hundred? Two hundred? A long one if you like.’

‘No, this is murder,’ I said, ‘and I’m back on the police suddenly at the Factory on account of it.’

Mauro said to the barman: ‘Give him a ring-a-ding, but a double, and hurry.’ He said to the watching man in the Burberry that had nearly dug my grave: ‘Take your eyes off from my friend.’

When the drinks came up, I said: ‘Mauro, I feel I’ve just got to talk to you for five minutes, it’s a human matter, can you make us a corner free?’

Mauro leaned over the bar and said to the barman: ‘You see this man?’ He stabbed a finger at me. ‘You never forget him, all right? He took me in out of the pissing rain one night years ago back over to his place when I hadn’t a light nor a roof and treated me like I was his son, and that’s not forgotten. So move the folk over and make us a table, move those boys there over, the folk in here think there’s nothing serious in life but playing cards; mind, I know they spend money.’ When the place was ready under the thick Nazionale cigarette smoke, Mauro said: ‘Stop watching the soft porn on that video, come over with me now and sit down.’ He said to the barman: ‘Bring on the Bell’s. Bottle. Two glasses. Ice. It’s with me.’ When we were served, he said: ‘Well now, tell me.’

‘It’s bad,’ I said, ‘very bad. Only not for me – it’s the others this time, which is much worse.’

He said: ‘Is it true you’re back at the Factory? I got a whisper, but is it true?’

I said: ‘Mauro, yes I am back with the law. They called me. I’m not concealing anything, I’m back at A14.’

He said: ‘Is it Suarez? Carstairs? Felix Roatta?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He said: ‘Roatta was dirty; he got his head in the way.’

He lit a Westminster. ‘Is it true what I read, that the girl had AIDS?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Suarez was dying.’

‘Why take the trouble to kill her then?’ Mauro said.

‘Mauro,’ I said, ‘I’m here in friendship, but this case is full of Italians, and that’s why I’m here; I need your advice.’

He said: ‘Go on.’

I said: ‘I’m coming round to the idea that she was killed by whoever it was who gave her AIDS, and that suited people.’

‘She worked at the Parallel Club, didn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and we’ve buckled three of them. They’re over at the Factory now.’ I drank some whisky. I said: ‘Mauro, this is very nasty, and I need no lectures.’

‘Italians,’ he said. ‘You mean Scalo, Robacci – they’re the Parallel.’

I said: ‘Have you heard about the rats?’

‘No,’ he said. The barman brought us more ice. ‘What rats?’

I told him about the rats; I told him about Suarez in the morgue, about the pathologist, about Wiecienski, about everything. I said: ‘Suarez, ah poor child, she thought too much, she wrote too much, she ended up knowing too much. Remember, she wasn’t just killed, Mauro, she was axed to death, and it took the killer several blows. He also wanked in her blood and drank some of it. He also killed Betty Carstairs, the old lady who was sheltering Suarez because she interrupted him while he was finishing Suarez off.’ I added: ‘And it’s even worse than that. I
think Suarez was in love with her killer, or at least had been.’ I said: ‘Mauro, try and help me get justice for this girl.’

He said: ‘How?’

I said: ‘How many Italians here do you know called Tony? Very sporty and can’t get their rocks off, so they kill the woman.’ I leaned over to him across my glass and said to him very quietly: ‘Suppose Suarez were our wife or daughters, what would we do?’

He sat very still.

Taking his hand, I said to him: ‘Help me, Mauro. We’ve known each other for a long while now. I’ve declared myself, told you who I am again, what I’m doing, what I’m on. You don’t have to help me unless you want. But all I know is one thing, this man’s got to be caught, you can see that, you can see he’s a maniac. I’m here talking to you because I’m desperate to catch him, for if you had been with me in the flat at Empire Gate and then at the morgue to see her body, then you would have known.’

‘An axe,’ said Mauro, staring at the table, ‘a nine-millimetre Quickhammer. A name? The idea of a name?’

‘Just Tony so far,’ I said. ‘Suarez never named names. I can go on squeezing the three men we’ve hammered till hell gets tired, but we haven’t that kind of time. I have to find a shorter way.’

‘You got any kind of face for this Tony?’

‘I’ve took these,’ I said. I got the photographs I had out of my pocket.

He looked at the pictures, then started pouring out a drink without looking where the bottle was. In the end he said: ‘This is very very difficult.’

‘Family?’

‘Well, the clan,’ said Mauro, ‘but he was always wrong-sprung.’

The light turned darker over our table.

‘A big girl died very abruptly in a hotel room in Kings Cross once,’ said Mauro. ‘I’m going back seventeen years now. She was found by the maid that came in to do the beds with her head half cut off and her nose in the bedside ashtray. Do you remember?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Big, fat girl. No story in it; Serious Crimes didn’t
want to know, the press neither. Three lines on page three. It was Frank Ballard dealt with it while he was still sergeant at A14 and I was on the beat in Chelsea. Vicar’s daughter up from the sticks, liked a fuck, frankly. Razored and bottled – we never got anyone.’

‘No you didn’t,’ said Mauro, ‘you hardly could, because we covered it that time.’

‘Only that time?’

‘Yes, he made a mistake with one of our women, so we went up against him several of us, and you could say that that was when he started to take up running in a very serious way.’

‘Mauro,’ I said, ‘who is it?’

He said: ‘It’s very hard for me; I’m just not a man to talk to the police.’

‘Ballard, Stevenson and I, we exist because of these photographs,’ I said, pointing at them. I said: ‘Think of Suarez. Think of that daughter. They were fat, ugly or sick; but they were still lives.’

In the end he said: ‘Now he calls himself Tony Spavento.’

‘That his real name?’

‘No,’ said Mauro. ‘Spavento is the Italian word for terror. I’m not allowed to tell you what his real name was.’

‘Was?’

‘He doesn’t exist for us now.’

‘Sounds bad.’

‘His own family have a permanent contract on him here.’

I stood up; I was a bit pissed and trying to think, too. I said good-bye to Mauro. I walked up the moth-eaten carpet of the club stairs to the street; I went back to the Factory thinking of Suarez’s body, lying axed and naked on our earth as if, poor child, she were all our loved ones, all of them.

Do you know I cry in my sleep? Do you think a man can’t cry in his sleep?

I opened the door into Room 202. Stevenson was there with Robacci. Robacci was smiling; I decided to cure that, put an end to the smile. Stevenson said to me: ‘Robacci’s talking. He’s happy.’

I said: ‘I’m not at all happy.’ I said to Robacci: ‘Tell me about Tony Spavento now; let’s have it straight up, darling.’

‘I just went on and on appealing to the facts and to his conscience until he spat the whole lot out,’ Stevenson was saying. ‘I was just about to send down for a nice cup of tea each.’

‘Spat what out?’ I said. I took Robacci softly by the jacket and said: ‘I am fed up with your lies, now start telling me about Tony Spavento.’

Robacci went dead white and said: ‘What? I can’t – we all have to live.’

I said: ‘You went the wrong way about it.’ I didn’t touch Robacci; I didn’t hurt Robacci. I just massaged the lapel on his jacket and went on doing it. ‘Spavento,’ I said. ‘Talk.’

‘We don’t talk about him,’ Robacci whispered.

I said to Robacci: ‘You’re now in a dreadful jam, Robacci. If you don’t talk to us, we throw you to Canterbury, that’s twenty years. That’s the wolves. You’ll be seen to when you get there. While if you do talk to us, your own folk’ll see to you before you’re even charged.’ I said: ‘Anyway we’re both sides watching you now, so you’ve really no way out, you’re fucked.’

Robacci said: ‘OK, OK, so I do some bird, but I’m for nothing with this man Spavento.’

‘Wrong,’ I said, ‘anyway for us, it was you folk took the contract out on Roatta.’

‘Not me, not me!’ Robacci screamed. ‘If it was anybody, it was Scalo.’

‘When robbers start thinking safety first,’ I said to Stevenson, ‘it really is pathetic, isn’t it? It really says good-bye to everything pretty well, doesn’t it, and isn’t that a funeral for you, it’s really very very sad, I find.’

Robacci said: ‘Roatta was into Spavento.’

‘Never mind all that now,’ I said. ‘Basically it was down to the rats, wasn’t it?’

‘OK, yes; well, Tony minded them.’