The Pigeon Tunnel (34 page)

You will not be surprised to read then that in low moments, like many sons of many fathers, I ask myself which bits of me still belong to Ronnie, and how much of me is mine. Is there really a big difference, I wonder, between the man who sits at his desk and dreams up scams on the blank page (
me
), and the man who puts on a clean shirt every morning and, with nothing in his pocket but imagination, sallies forth to con his victim (
Ronnie
)?

Ronnie the conman could spin you a story out of the air, sketch in a character who did not exist, and paint a golden opportunity when there wasn't one. He could blind you with bogus detail or helpfully clarify a non-existent knotty point if you weren't quick enough on the uptake to grasp the technicalities of his con first time round. He could withhold a great secret on grounds of confidentiality, then whisper it to your ear alone because he has decided to trust you.

And if all that isn't part and parcel of the writer's art, tell me what is.

It was Ronnie's misfortune to be an anachronism in his own lifetime. In the twenties when he set out in business, an unscrupulous trader could bankrupt himself in one town, and next day raise credit in another fifty miles away. But as time went by, communications began to catch up with Ronnie the way they caught up with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I am sure he was deeply shocked when Singapore Special Branch confronted him with his British police record. And shocked again when, summarily deported to Indonesia, he was put behind bars for currency offences and gun-running. And more shocked still when a few years later the Swiss police dragged him out of his hotel bedroom in the Dolder Grand hotel in Zurich, and banged him up in the district jail. Reading recently how the gentlemen of
FIFA
were whisked from their beds in the Baur au Lac in Zurich and distributed to selected prison cells around the town, I see Ronnie forty-odd years ago suffering the same humiliation at the same hour at the hands of the same Swiss police.

Grand hotels are the conman's catnip. Until that dawn in Zurich, Ronnie had stayed in any number of them and his system had never failed: take the best suite the best hotel has to offer, entertain lavishly, endear yourself to the doormen, headwaiters and above all the concierges, i.e. tip them handsomely and often. Make phone calls all over the world and when the hotel presents its first bill, say you have passed it to your people for settlement. Or, if you are playing the long game, delay the first bill then settle it, but nothing thereafter.

As soon as you sense you're outstaying your welcome, pack a light suitcase, slip the concierge a twenty or a fifty, and tell him you've got pressing business out of town which may detain you for the night. Or if he's that kind of concierge, give him a fat wink and say you have an
obligation to a lady friend – oh, and will he kindly make sure your suite is safely locked because of all the valuable kit it's got in it? – having already made sure that whatever valuable kit you've got, if any, is already in your light suitcase. And maybe, for extra cover, you give the concierge your golf clubs to look after by way of reassurance, but only if needs must, because you love your golf.

But that dawn raid at the Dolder told Ronnie that the game was up. And today, forget it. They have your credit card details. They know where your children go to school.

Might Ronnie with his proven powers of deception have made a spymaster? True, when he deceived people he also deceived himself, although that wouldn't necessarily disqualify him. But if he possessed a secret – his own or anyone else's – he was positively uncomfortable until he had shared it, which would certainly have presented a problem.

Show business? After all, he'd made a good fist of looking over a major Berlin film studio under the pretext of representing myself and Paramount Pictures, so why stop there? And Hollywood, as we all know, has a well-attested habit of taking conmen to its bosom.

Or how about actor? Didn't he love the long mirror? Hadn't he spent his whole life pretending to be people he wasn't?

But Ronnie never wanted to be a star. He wanted to be Ronnie, a cosmos of one.

As to becoming a writer of his own fictions, forget it. He didn't envy my literary notoriety. He owned it.

It is 1963. I have just arrived in New York on my first ever visit to the United States.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
is riding at the top of the charts. My American publisher escorts me to the 21 Club
for a grand dinner. As the maître d' shows us to our table, I see Ronnie seated in a corner.

For years we have been estranged. I had no idea he was in America, but he is, and twelve feet away, with a brandy-and-ginger at his elbow. How on earth did he get here? Easily. He called up my soft-hearted American publisher and plucked at his heart strings. He played the Irish card. One look at my publisher's name tells him he is of Irish origin.

We ask Ronnie to join us at our table. Humbly, he accepts, bringing his brandy-and-ginger with him; but only for a quick drink, he insists, then he'll leave us to ourselves. He is sweet and proud and pats my arm, and tells me with tears in his eyes that he hasn't been a bad father, has he, son, and we've done all right together, haven't we, then? Yes, yes, we've done fine together, Dad, just fine, I agree.

Then Jack, my publisher, who's a proud father as well as being Irish, says why doesn't Ronnie finish whatever he's drinking and let's have a bottle of champagne. So we do, and Ronnie raises his glass and drinks to our book. Note the
our.
Then Jack says, hell Ronnie, why don't you just sit here and eat with us too? So Ronnie lets himself be persuaded, and orders himself a nice mixed grill.

Out on the pavement we have our obligatory bear-hug, and he weeps, which he does a lot: big, sobbing shrugs. I weep too, and ask him whether he's all right for money, to which amazingly he replies that he is. Then he gives me some advice for life, in case I'm letting our book's success go to our head:

‘You may be a successful writer, son,' he says through more sobs, ‘but you're not a
celebrity.
'

And having left me with this incomprehensible warning, he sets off into the night without saying where he's going, which I guess means he has a lady on the go, because he almost always has.

Months afterwards, I'm able to piece together the back-story to this encounter. Ronnie was on the run, with no money and nowhere to live.
However, New York City's real estate agents were offering a month's free accommodation to first-time tenants in new developments. Under different names Ronnie was flat-hopping: a free month here, a free month there, and so far they hadn't caught up with him, but God help him when they did. It could only have been out of pride that he turned down my offer of money, because he was desperate and had already touched my elder brother for the better part of his savings.

On the day after our dinner at the 21 Club, he had called up the sales department of my American publishing house, introduced himself as my father – and of course as a close friend of my publisher – ordered a couple of hundred copies of
our book
, charged them to the author's account, and signed them in his own name for handing around as his business card.

I have by now received a score of such books, with the owners' requests that I add my signature to Ronnie's. The standard version reads ‘Signed by the Author's Father', with an extra large F for Father. And mine in return reads, ‘Signed by the Author's Father's Son', with an extra large S for Son.

But try being Ronnie for a moment, as I have done too often. Try standing alone on the streets of New York, stony-broke. You've tapped whoever you can tap, milked your contacts dry. In England you're on the Wanted list, and you're on the Wanted list here in New York. You daren't show your passport, you're using false names to hop between apartments you can't pay for, and all that stands between you and perdition is your animal wit and a double-breasted pinstripe from Berman of Savile Row that you home-press every evening. It's the kind of situation they dream up for you at spy school: ‘Now let's see how you talk your way out of this one.' Allowing for the odd lapse now and then, Ronnie would have passed that test with flying colours.

The ship that Ronnie always dreamed of came home shortly after his death, in one of those drowsy Dickensian law courts where complex
disputes about money are thrashed out over a very long time. For caution's sake, I will name the afflicted London suburb Cudlip, because it's entirely possible that the same legal battle is rumbling to this day, just as it had rumbled through the last twenty-odd years of Ronnie's life, then rumbled without him for another two.

The facts of the case are simplicity itself. Ronnie had befriended Cudlip's local council, notably its planning committee. How this had come about is easily imagined. They were fellow Baptists, or fellow Masons, or cricketers, or snooker players. Or they were married men in their prime who, until they met Ronnie, had never tasted the nocturnal pleasures of the West End. Perhaps they also looked forward to a slice of what Ronnie had assured them would be a big cake.