Life Goes On (11 page)

Someone came up the stairs – and Kenny Dukes crashed the door open. ‘Get off my fucking bed, or I'll smash your face to pulp.'

His portly and upright carriage was spoiled by the fact that he was slightly round-shouldered. Otherwise I don't suppose he was a very bad figure of a man, except that his arms were too long. In fact they were the longest arms I'd seen on a person who could still be called a human being. And he could – just. They were positively anglepoise, so that in a fight you had to close in as soon as possible to avoid their reach.

I leaned on my left elbow. ‘Don't you ever use long words such as: “I'll obliterate your features so that your own mother wouldn't recognise you in Woolworth's on Saturday afternoon”?' Then I put on a pseudo-Yank accent straight out of Sidney Blood: ‘Anyway, if you wanna know where the dough is, there's seventy-five thousand smackers under the bed, all cut out of newspaper. They passed us a dead duck, and we've got to get out and find 'em.'

He came in close, but recognised the style. ‘That's my book.'

‘Come closer, Sunshine.' The interior ratchet of my right arm drew back. I couldn't go on reading Sidney Blood's inspiring prose forever, without acting on it.

‘Haven't I seen you somewhere before?' he said.

I wound up the springs in my feet as well. During ten years at Upper Mayhem I'd done plenty of labouring on the station and its surroundings. I'd helped local farmers at potato harvests. Every morning I did half an hour's jumping on the spot with dumbbells. Without being a fanatic, I believed in keeping the six feet and eleven stone of me supple and ready for action. Bill Straw wasn't the only one to develop his physical abilities. As for shooting, I could get two rabbits on the run with the twelve bore, in view of which I wasn't going to put up with any shit from Kenny Dukes.

I shot off the bed like a rocket, and his fist went by my face and hit the pillow so hard that the frame shook. Being heavy he lost his balance, of which I took advantage by gripping him at the neck so that he couldn't move. He kicked around, but his boots couldn't reach me. I'd always known him to be the sort of courageous coward who wasn't afraid to come out from under his shell and turn into a bully.

‘What's the excitement?' I said. But he wasn't the type who would plead for me to let him go, either. Whether this was due to obstinacy, or to a chronic lack of vocabulary I didn't know. ‘We don't want bloodshed, do we? Not this early on in our relationship.'

He gasped as if his chest would burst. ‘I've seen you before.'

I squeezed him harder into the half-nelson. ‘I'm Michael Cullen. We met ten years ago, remember?' While his elastic-band computer was processing this bit of information I let him go and jumped clear, putting myself in such a state of defence that when he regained the vertical he made a rapid gut-decision not to carry on the feud, at least for the time being. ‘I'm working for Moggerhanger as well,' I said, ‘so if there's any argy-bargy he'll fire us both. You know that. Now lay off.'

His pig-eye cunning, which hid softening of the brain behind, stood him in good stead for once. ‘You was reading my fucking book.'

‘I needed intellectual stimulus.'

‘And you was on my fucking bed.'

‘I can't read standing up. And once I'd started, I couldn't stop.'

He sat down, mollified for the moment. ‘Fucking good, ennit?'

‘Best book I ever read.'

He smiled. ‘Yeh.'

I sat on the bed. ‘You read a lot.'

‘Every minute, when I'm not fucking birds and 'ittin' people, and driving one of Lord Moggerhanger's flash Rollers with all the dazzle-lights on.'

I pulled on my whisky flask. ‘Like a drop?'

He took a swig. I wouldn't trust him five minutes with a twenty-year-old banger. ‘Can't drink much in case I'm called out,' he said. ‘We're on tap all the time. Could be four in the morning. There's no night and day for Lord Claud.'

‘What about time off?'

A laugh made him look human. ‘When you're dead you get time off. But now he's got you, he might let me go home a few days.'

‘You've been busy?'

His eyes narrowed, perhaps at the notion that I was pumping him. ‘Just looking around for somebody to hit and kick.'

‘Who for? You might as well tell me. I expect I'll have to find him sooner or later.'

‘The boss tells, not me.'

‘Fair enough.' I opened my case, and found
The Return of the Native
which I'd finished on the train. Bridgitte had read it three years ago when she'd done an Open University course. ‘Try this. It ain't as good as Sidney Blood, but it's all right.'

He turned it over like a piece of cold toast. ‘Don't like books about wogs.'

‘Wogs?'

‘Fucking blackies. Can't stand 'em.'

‘It isn't about blacks.' I found it hard not to laugh. ‘I'm a native myself.'

‘You don't fucking look it. You're like me.'

I let that pass. ‘We're all natives.'

‘You're fucking pig-ignorant.'

‘You're a native as well.'

He stood up, looked at himself in a piece of mirror by the door and straightened his tie. He wore an expensive grey suit and a silk shirt which was ready for the wash. Being of a similar build to his employer, I wondered if they weren't Moggerhanger's throwaways. ‘I've drunk your drink,' he said, ‘but you ought to be careful what you're saying.'

I don't know why I persisted. ‘I'm a native of Nottingham because I was born there. Lord Moggerhanger is a native of Bedfordshire because he was born there. You're a native of Walworth.'

‘Kennington.'

‘Kennington, then, because you were born there. The blacks in London aren't natives, unless they were born here, and then they are. That's all it means.
The Return of the Native
is about a man who comes back to the place he was born at.'

His mind veered off my explanation. It was too long. ‘I've got to be going. Got to go and see my mum. Knock her about a bit, otherwise she won't fink I love her.' He winked, as if he'd been taking the piss out of me. ‘Don't break my wanker,' he said as he swaggered out of the door.

I lay full length on the bed, and decided I liked being at work, and went to sleep wondering how Maria was getting on with Bridgitte. Being so different, they seemed made for each other. Perhaps Bridgitte would send for the children from Holland. Maria thought Upper Mayhem a paradise and would work for nothing as long as she was allowed to stay, though she wouldn't go short of money – I'd see to that. She and Bridgitte would settle down and keep the place going for when I needed a refuge from the busy world. I laughed at the picture and, a final vision showing my homely settlement in flames, thought that at least I had done some positive good by finding Bill Straw a hiding place.

Kenny Dukes was right. At four in the morning the blower went. It was fixed to the wall by the door so I had to cross the room to answer it. ‘Come to the house,' Moggerhanger said. ‘And I don't mean in your pyjamas.'

I smartened up and, wide awake, crossed the yard to headquarters. The man by the door, no doubt with a gun under his coat, was Cottapilly, a big heavy swine who always went upstairs as quiet as a cloth-footed fly, so nimble on his feet that people expected to see a small man. He then put their surprise to maximum advantage. Afterwards, neat little turds of fag ash were seen on the stairs, as if someone had gone up on their hands and knees. He wore no collar or tie, but his boots were impeccably polished.

I was even more certain that some important scheme was being put into action when I saw Jericho Jim sitting in the corridor outside Moggerhanger's office. He was thin and of medium height, with thick grey hair and an incredibly lined face, though from a distance you would have taken him for thirty instead of fifty. Each icy blue eye shone like the point of a pen torch that a doctor shoves down your gullet to look at your tonsils. He'd been most of his life in prison, but had escaped so many times, even from Dartmoor, that they called him Jericho Jim, though his real name was Wilfred. He always ate the middle from a loaf first, on the assumption that he might die in the next five seconds or in case some well-wisher had put a file inside. It was a matter of old habits dying hard, and that by their feeding shall you know them. He stopped pulling the comb through his wavy hair to run his hands over my jacket and trousers.

‘Do you think I'm barmy?' I said.

‘Instructions,' he lisped. ‘They're waiting for you.'

The room wasn't as empty as it had been the day before. Moggerhanger stood behind his desk wearing a flowered dressing-gown that came down to the floor, and smoking the kind of cigar that his doctor had said would put him in his bury-box. But I suppose it was a case of once a lord, always a lord. His manner hadn't altered from when I first saw him. There was an open map on the table, and as soon as Pindarry closed the door Moggerhanger pointed to it. ‘Michael, can you read one of them?'

‘Like a book.' I'd gone walking and cycling with Smog in the school holidays, and he was the one who had taught me to read maps.

‘You're the only one who can, then,' he said, ‘apart from myself. That's why I took you on.' The room was blindingly lit from a series of striplights flush with the ceiling. Two men I didn't know sat at a table by the wall, earphones on and their backs to me, and I heard the crackle of police voices from one and the bird noises of morse from the other. Moggerhanger looked over his shoulder and said to Pindarry: ‘He'll be in time if he sets off now. The boat gets in at eight o'clock.' From behind his desk he asked: ‘Do you know where Goole is?'

I was about to say I hadn't seen him in years, when I remembered it was a place. ‘On the Lincolnshire coast?'

‘It's a river port in Yorkshire,' said Pindarry.

I suppose I had to notice him. He didn't have a pot belly, but he was beefy at the midriff, and that's something you can't hide. I liked him less than Cottapilly. Even in the presence of the chief he always wore a little Austrian-type hat with a feather up the side. One of his teeth was missing, which you wouldn't notice unless he laughed – though he never laughed. He only smiled and then, so it was said, you were in trouble. But he had to eat, and Bill Straw told me he'd once shared a trough of rice and mutton with him on the pipeline road between Baghdad and Beirut in their smuggling days, adding that you no longer joined the Navy to see the world, but just signed on with Jack Leningrad Limited.

‘I want you to collect some packages,' Moggerhanger said. ‘Leave at five and you should be there by ten. We're sending you up in the Rolls-Royce, so take care of it. One scratch on the Roller means two on your face, only they'll be deeper. You'll be driving one of my prime motors, not a two-tone trapdoor estate with a battered right headlight and a crumpled wing, which has to be off the road before dark. If by any chance you should find yourself confronted by a police roadblock, don't try a Turpin and jump over it. Just say what your business is, and they'll let you through.'

He ran his organisation like the head of a country in wartime, and maybe not even he knew whether he made more money out of lawful business than rackets. He owned gambling houses, cafés and restaurants, hotels and roadhouses, caravan parks and amusement arcades, sex shops and strip clubs, escort agencies, garages and car hire firms, bucket shops for cheap travel called Pole-axe Tours, as well as loan and finance firms: ‘Twelve thousand mortgages a day: just pay your money and you're safe for life.' Shadier operations involved smuggling and putting up money for criminal enterprises. If his connection with the Inland Revenue was frosty but correct, his association with some members of the police force was cordial, as I knew from the hand-in-glove manner in which he and Chief Inspector Lanthorn had got me put away for eighteen months. Lanthorn had to have someone to charge when the customs broke the smuggling gang, and Moggerhanger opted for me rather than Kenny Dukes – or himself. I had made plenty of money, so took the sentence as it was deserved and because I'd had no option. But I had grown less philosophical about it over the years, though I don't suppose I would have been bitten so hard by the cobra of revenge if Bill Straw hadn't dragged me back into the mainstream of a job with Moggerhanger.

‘I can't guarantee a rotten little A40 won't drive into me,' I said. ‘The roads are full of anarchists these days.'

He put an arm around my shoulder. ‘It's only a manner of speaking, Michael. I want you to stay in one piece: drive carefully, collect the goods, and take them to a place in Shropshire, where you'll wait till somebody collects them. Then come back here to me. If you want to know anything else, ask Mrs Whipplegate. She's my private secretary, and knows everything.'

She stood by a filing cabinet on the other side of the room, a tall thin woman who didn't have what I reckoned to be a good figure. But because she seemed inaccessible – with her grey svelte dress, a natty coloured flimsy scarf at the neck, and high-heeled shoes – I wanted to get to know her in the one way that mattered. Maybe because of her short darkish hair, slightly grey at the temples, and small black hornrimmed glasses, I assumed she was a widow (and if not hoped she soon would be) and reckoned she was in early middle age, though I learned later she was thirty-eight. The best part was her legs which, being shapely and plump, were out of character with her thin figure. I thought she might be one of Moggerhanger's girlfriends, but told myself she wasn't the sort he liked. She carried a handful of envelopes. ‘If you'll come next door, Mr Cullen, I'll give you your instructions.'

‘Before you go, Michael, I want to wish you luck,' Moggerhanger said. ‘It's an important job, and if you do it well there'll be a bonus for you. I look after my lads, though I don't buy 'em. You won't see that sort of money. But I'll make it right with you.'