Then We Take Berlin (6 page)

“The Gorblimey kid, eh? Frank, as you’re so fond of adopting slang, let me ask you this. When was the last time you stood at the corner of Seventy-First and Lexington and had somebody knock you on your
tuchus
?”

“Joe . . . I’m not saying you blew it.”

“Oh, but you are.”

“OK. Maybe you blew it. Maybe you didn’t. But look at it this way . . . Steve and I are giving you what so few of us ever get in life. A second chance.”

“A second chance?”

“Don’t make it sound like I tossed you a turd. This is big money.”

“So far you haven’t mentioned money. Is that because you wanted me softened up first? Receptive to your shady deal and your greenbacks?”

“Fuck you, Joe, you never asked till now. And this is twenty grand we’re talking about.”

It was more, so much more than Wilderness had expected. It was more than he could earn in two years. And Frank had just taken the wind out of his sails.

“You’re surprised, right?”

“Yes.”

“And pleased?”

“I could be.”

“Joe, it says how much Steve wants his aunt out. You’re the guy to do this. I’ve told him that all along. I told him you don’t come cheap. The guys on the Brighton line might get you cheap, but this is New York. He’ll pay ten grand. Guaranteed. Cash. All he wants to hear from me now is that you’ll do it.”

Down the avenue thirty blocks away, the western light was turning the Chrysler into a shimmer of beaten Krupp titanium, a shining spear of pure, impulsive folly a quarter of a mile high. It seemed to Wilderness that the skyscraper was female, a woman—it had to be—and she’d just winked at him. Folly to folly.

“OK. I’ll do it.”

“Great. Great, Absolutely fuckin’ great. It’ll be like old times. Berlin ’48 all over again. Only this time we don’t get caught!”

“You didn’t get caught, Frank. I did.”

§9

He got back to the Gramercy late after another night at The Five Spot. Another note waiting for him at reception.

“I’m in the bar.”

No signature.

“She’s been there awhile,” the desk clerk said.

Wilderness could handle one more drink with Dorothy Shearer.

It wasn’t Dorothy Shearer, it was Clarissa Troy.

She’d worn well, scarcely a sign that she had aged in fifteen years, and he reckoned she must be getting on for fifty. Big eyes, big tits, and an habitual, kissable (not that he ever had) pout. All this in a five foot package—a pocket Venus.

“What do I call you?”

“Weeeellll kid, truth to tell I
am
Mrs. Troy. That really is my moniker. But you can call me Tosca—just like you used to.”

“And Frank really doesn’t recognise you?”

“Nope. That’s got to be the third time Arthur’s introduced us, and he’s never so much as blinked. He’s such a dumb fuck, which kinda brings me to the point. What the hell are you doing getting mixed up with Frank again?”

“It’s different. This time it’ll be different.”

“Joe . . . for fuck’s sake . . . you got caught . . . you damn near got killed. If it had been me I’d be crossing the sidewalk every time I saw Frank Spoleto heading my way.”

“Trust me.”

“Oh hell, kid. How much money has the bastard offered you?”

II

Another Novel “Without a Hero”

If this is a novel without a hero,

at least let us lay claim to a heroine.

William Makepeace Thackeray:
Vanity Fair

1847

§10

London
: May 1941

His mother died much as she had lived. In a pub. A daylight raid on London in the spring of 1941 by the Luftwaffe had taken out the Blackamoor’s Head, Matlock Street, E14. It was half an hour after lunchtime closing and had the landlord closed on time, the death toll might have been less than total. When they dug through the rubble they found Lily Holderness upright at the bar, a large if dusty gin and lime in her hand, stone dead.

Her husband, Harry, was training with the Fifth Battalion of the East Kent Regiment in Wales—a survivor of Dunkirk, an event he spoke of with neither pride nor optimism. He called it his post-debacle course or “how-not-to-fuck-it-all-up-twice.”

Her son, John, was thirteen. He could have been a scallywag of the streets, using parental neglect as the perfect excuse to run wild in the violent, ragged freedom of war. He was at school. He would never admit it, but he liked school. He hated teachers. One of the few things father and son would ever agree on was that the only good teacher was a dead one, but he liked learning and adored knowing. He collected knowledge without system, but imposing some sense of system was the job of universities and boys of John Holderness’s class did not go to universities, and rather than a butterfly mind he might best be described as having a jackdaw mind. Not admitting any of this saved him many a playground kicking.

The first he knew of his mother’s death was not when he got home to the empty flat in Maroon Street—that, after all, was the norm—but when she didn’t turn up to eat the meal he had cooked her before he went to bed.

When the pubs closed—those that had survived another day in the Blitz—an ARP warden banged on the door to tell him through beery breath that his mum was dead.

He ate her portion and went back to bed, only half-wondering if his dad would be recalled from Wales, and, if he was, how best to handle the bastard.

In the morning, he dressed, ate the egg that Lily had set aside for herself, and was preparing to set off for school when his grandfather—his maternal grandfather, Abner Riley—let himself in.

“The buggers only told me an hour ago,” he said.

“I’m fine, Grandad.”

“No, son. No, you’re not.”

He sat down on the only armchair in the room, wedged between the cooker and the fireplace. Wilderness had no idea what the old man meant.

“It’s the flat, d’ye see? Council-owned. They’re going to want it back. And given how many poor buggers got bombed out these last six months they’re going to want it back sharpish.”

“But I live here. This is my home.”

“Copper who banged on my door at first light this mornin’ sez you was like as not goin’ to a home. A hinstitution. On account as you was now a norphan. Bollox I tells him. The boy’s a norphan the day they nail me down in me box. So . . . you grab your things and you come back wi’ me.”

Wilderness did not see how he could be an orphan while his father still lived, but knew that the verbal shorthand said how little the neighbourhood thought of his father. They could not forget him—he had thumped too many heads for that—but they might prefer to. Whilst preferable to a London County Council orphanage, the prospect of life with Abner Riley was not pleasing. Wilderness liked him more than he had liked his daughter—Lily had been an impossible person, and hence impossible to like with any sustained affection—but he was a complete rogue and an habitual criminal. The great-aunts out in Essex were his sisters, the very best of a very bad bunch—better because settled, their parents having given up the gypsy life with its caravans and petty theft for a fixed abode and more serious theft about the time of the old Queen’s jubilee.

“’Ave yer much to pack, son?”

Wilderness thought his grandfather, however well meaning, had little grasp of children. It had been woman’s work to men of his generation, and to their sons’ generation too. He could have said he’d pack his teddy and Abner would not have batted an eyelid. Instead, he stuffed his spare trousers into a cardboard suitcase along with a shirt, the rags that passed for underwear and the socks desperate for darning. He tied the laces of his football boots together and slung them around his neck. His books he bound up with a striped elastic belt with a snake-S buckle and stuffed under one arm.

“OK,” he said.

“Books, eh? You must take arter yer dad. No one on my side o’ the family ever cared much for readin’. Never learnt meself. Righty-ho, we’re orf.”

Wilderness took a last look at the only home he had never known, and despite what he had said on the matter of “home” to Abner, he found no remnant of home than could even aspire to meaning. Two rooms, furniture that was scarcely better than matchwood, a khazi out in the yard, a single tap above the sink, wallpaper that peeled off in the damp, mouseholes in the skirting, black patches of mold in every cold corner. Two rooms that froze in winter, only to swelter in summer.

He doubted too that Abner lived much better. He’d not been to his grandfather’s house since the last row between him and Lily sometime around 1936. It was a walk of only a couple of miles. He knew it by heart, by pace, by flagstone—he’d walked over from Maroon Street, Limehouse to Sidney Street in Whitechapel a hundred times without ever knocking on Abner’s door. If he passed Abner in the street, the old man—old? he was fifty-seven—would usually slip him a sixpence, ask after his mother and not listen to the boy’s answer. The gang to which he intermittently belonged had taken on one of the Sidney Street gangs half a dozen times in the last three years and had the shit kicked out of them every time. This time he trod their turf with impunity, escorted by the street’s hard man—Abner Riley, cracksman and burglar.

The Sidney Street house was three storeys. A narrow blade of a house standing on a plot less than fifteen feet wide. A house, not a flat. A house with some sense of decoration, some substantial, heavyweight Victorian furniture and a sense of being lived in and looked after that his last home had always seemed to lack. A woman lived here. Not a drunken, life-incapable excuse-for-a-woman like his mother, but someone who bothered from time to time. No one had ever mentioned a grandmother. For all he knew, the faeries had brought Lily one day in 1908. Or more likely Abner had stolen her—but then, why would he keep her? No, Abner had a girlfriend. It seemed unlikely, but more plausible than a lodger. Lodgers didn’t go with Abner’s job. Abner had a girlfriend.

“Odd, we never met, eh kid? Still can’t be our fault, can it? Name’s Merle. Me and yer grandad’s . . . y’know . . .”

Yes. He knew.

Her name wasn’t Merle. It was Mary-Ann. When she and Abner had met she had been turning tricks up West and Merle (after Merle Oberon) carried less sense of violated virginity than any combination of names that included “Mary.” The fares preferred fucking a Merle to a Mary.

The boy had his own room.

His own room. His own bed. A jug of water and a basin on the stand. A pot to piss in. No more sleeping on roll-out on the kitchen floor. No more pissing in the sink. As he looked up at the moon peeping at him through two centuries of dirt caking the skylight, he found himself quietly grateful to Abner for creating a level of poverty a few fractions higher than his own. Grateful, still suspicious, still scared, still baffled, but also aware of lesson one in a course of which he had no need—but he learnt it all the same—crime pays.

The funeral was apt. The church itself—St. George’s-in-the-East—as blown to bollocks as any other house not so favoured by God. They’d swept the broken glass aside, made some attempt to shovel out the rubble and held what turned out to be an outdoor/indoor, roofless service in the ruins of Hawksmoor’s vision, followed by a swift burial in the churchyard under a peeping May sun, with the last draught of April tugging at their hair. Abner had no hair, Merle wore one of her many wigs, and Wilderness stood hatless in an ill-fitting blazer and even iller-fitting grey flannel trousers. He’d no idea where either had come from. Abner had simply produced them on the morning of the funeral and said, “Can’t see yer mum orf in rags, now can we?”

Of Herbert Henry Asquith Holderness, L/Cpl, 5th Batt., The Royal East Kents, there was no sign.

The wake was an equal absence.

Most of Lily’s friends had perished in the raid that killed her, and Wilderness had long ago worked out that the only friend an alcoholic has or needs comes in a bottle.

It was left to the three of them to mourn and blame.

“I blame meself,” Abner said.

“Whyzat?” from Merle.

“I spoilt the kid. Never said no to her. Not from the moment she batted her blue eyes at me. And then when her mum died, it was just ’er an’ me . . . I spoilt her even more.”

“Yeah, well,” Merle said over her glass of stout. “Let’s not spoil this one, eh?”

Abner laughed.

“Spoil ’im. I’s’ll thrash ’im night and day!”

It was obvious they were joking.

Harry Holderness was not.

His first act on stepping into Abner’s parlour was to knock the boy across the room with the back of his hand.

Absence distorts. Wilderness had an idea of his father that was less than the reality. He’d always pictured a big man, and common sense told him that if he and Harry ever met again the man would appear proportionately smaller as he himself had grown.

But the bastard was huge. At least six two, barrel-chested, rippling with muscle and churning with rage.

“No ’ard feelings. That’s just to let you know who’s who.”