2 The Imposter (18 page)

“What is it?”

“You can’t leave me like this.”

“What? You ain’t hardly even been touched.”

“That’s what I mean––you have to give me a black eye.”

“You
want
a black eye?”

“It can’t look like I co-operated with you, can I? The boss needs to think I put up a scrap. He’ll think I was in on it and he’ll give me my cards. I’ve got a wife and a nipper to feed. I need this job.”

“You want me to hit you?”

“Just––you know, just a black eye.”

“If you say so.” Joseph struck him, quite hard, a left hook that dropped him to his knees. Billy whooped, laughing, and before any of them could stop him he swung a kick into the man’s gut. He fell onto his side, gasping, and Billy kicked him twice more. “How’s that?” he said, “good enough for you?”

“Whoah!” Jack laughed, surprised.

Billy kicked him again.

“Billy!”

“No names!” Edward shouted.

“He said he wanted it to be convincing––it’s what he wanted. I’m doing him a favour.” Billy swung a kick into the man’s head and a plume of blood spewed out and splattered across the ground.

“Enough!” Edward said, grabbing him and pulling him back out of range. “Jesus, man––you’ll bloody well kill him.”

He squared up to Edward. “Get your filthy hands off me.”

“Back off,” Joseph called sternly.

Billy shrugged Edward aside and laughed.

Edward knelt down by the guard’s side. He was bleeding from the mouth but the blood was from a badly cut lip, and not internal. He was conscious, but woozy.

“Is he alright?” Joseph asked.

“He’ll live.” Edward propped him against the side of the building and followed the others back to the road. “You’re a bloody fool!” he called after Billy.

“Ah, piss off.” He got into the car and Jack slipped in next to him.

“That was a bit over the top,” Jack said.

“Don’t you start.”

“I’m not having a go––I’m just saying.”

“See what I mean, though? About Fabian? The bloke ain’t got no balls.”

Jack started the engine. He didn’t reply.

“Let’s get off,” Billy said. “I feel like a drink.”

24

EDWARD WATCHED AS JACK MCVITIE adjusted his trilby. He was trying not to show his excitement as the dealer dealt another queen on the river. McVitie had played his hand slowly, carefully making sure Billy and Edward followed him to the last round of betting. They had, and he pushed half of his chips into the middle of the table.

Edward paused, making an assessment of the cards and his chances.

“So––what are you doing, Doc?” Jack said. “In or out?”

“I’m in.” He pushed the rest of his chips over the line.

McVitie turned to Billy. “You in or out?”

Billy made a show of deliberation. “You’re bluffing.”

“You best call me then, hadn’t you?”

“Fine. I’m all in.”

Jack laughed. He pushed the rest of his stack over the line, too.

They were flush, and they were enjoying themselves. This was a Costello place, several large rooms above a shoe-shop. Part-spieler, part-brothel. It was one of the more established joints in Soho. The dividing wall between two rooms had been knocked down and a baccarat table installed. A roulette wheel was next to that, together with a couple of tables for poker and chemin de feu. A mirrored bar had been fitted at one end of the room, with black market spirits hanging upside-down in optics. The bar was crescent-shaped, lit from beneath, with coloured Venetian glasses stacked on glass shelves. A chandelier hung from the ceiling and the windows were covered with thick, expensive Moroccan drapes. The clientele entered through a side-door on the street where they were met by a suited doorman and ushered up a bare staircase into the room. A door at the other end of the room led to three bedrooms. They were reasonably furnished. That was all that was required; after all, the guests did not stay long.

Smoke hung heavy in the gloom. There were ten around the table: Jack, Billy, Tommy, Joseph and Edward, four local businessmen and Lennie Masters, the perpetually-glowering thug that Edward had met the first time he had visited Halewell Close for Chiara’s birthday.

Edward settled back into his chair and waited for the last player to fold his hand. He was in an excellent mood. Ruby Ward had visited the lock-up and assessed the coats they had stolen that morning. Edward had discovered that he was much more than the face of the Costello’s automobile business: he was their main fence, using the car showroom as a legitimate front to launder their dirty money and to distribute the booty with which they fed the black market. They already knew that the coats cost forty pounds each in Mayfair, and they had thirty of them. Ruby had offered twenty apiece. He would sell them for thirty, but retailing the goods entailed the biggest risk and so no-one begrudged him his mark-up.

The adrenaline of the heist receded and, as it did, the four of them had been filled with exhilaration that they had successfully pulled off the job. It was something different from the burglaries. They were diversifying. Edward, too, felt more optimistic for his own prospects than he had for many years. The afternoon at the Ritz had underlined it for him: he was starting a new life. Goodbye to the deprivations of his return, the ignominy of begging the state for aid, the foul garret and his grasping landlord and the shameful prospect of pawning his things so he could afford to eat. He felt as he imagined emigrants felt when they left their problems behind them in some foreign country, discarded their old friends and relatives and past mistakes, setting sail for Australia, or America, and the promise of something better. He had felt this way before but he had been negligent then and, eventually, he had had no choice but to burn that life and exchange it for another unsatisfactory one. Now he would do it again. It was a chance to clean his slate.

He looked around the table. The five of them looked swell. His ratty old demob suit was a distant memory and now he wore a pale blue silk shirt with a Barrymore roll collar and a burgundy silk tie, the sort worn by Adolphe Menjou, the American actor. His shoes were hand-made from a shop in St. James’ that catered to crowned heads. They were made from wild boar, were bright yellow under the instep and they cost ten guineas. His suit was double-breasted, powder blue and cut in the American style. He looked and felt a million dollars.

Billy Stavropoulos had a large cigar clamped between his teeth. Edward looked at him, sitting there like the cock of the walk, and had the same anxious thoughts again. He was not the least bit contrite about his behaviour that morning. He’d made a joke of the beating he had meted out, laughing at the guard’s request that he should be marked and suggesting that he would have no trouble now in persuading his employers of his innocence. He’d get a raise, he reckoned, on account of the fight he must have put up. Edward thought Billy was hideous. He was cruel and unpleasant, uneducated even by the standards of the others, untroubled by the faintest shred of culture. If there was a potential impediment to his plan then he, undoubtedly, was it. There was a feral cunning to him, a natural wariness so that Edward knew he would always have to be watchful when he was around. He would never be able to truly relax. Billy made another crack about the morning’s work and looked around the table, gawking at the others to ensure that they found it amusing. Add a needy insecurity to his emotional make-up, Edward thought. The man was horrid from his head to his toes.

Lennie Masters chuckled at Billy’s joke, baring a yellowed set of teeth. Joseph smiled with a forbearing expression and Edward realised that he had come to accept the extremities of his behaviour. It was “just Billy,” he had explained by way of explanation earlier. He had “always been like that.” That really was not good enough so far as Edward was concerned. They were already taking significant risks and it made no sense to him to tolerate behaviour that made the risk worse. If he had been in control, that would be something that he would not allow. Billy’s behaviour was clumsy, stupid, dangerous and unnecessary. He knew he would have to discuss him with Joseph and he wondered how best to do that without annoying him. Billy was an old friend, after all. His oldest. Edward was new to the scene and knew it. It was difficult.

The bets were called, hands were folded. Billy, Jack and Edward were the last men standing.

“Let’s see your hand, then,” Billy said to Jack.

Jack gleefully laid the cards on the table. “Three Queens,” he said.

Edward had a pair of jacks, and he hadn’t played them well at all. Jack’s trio beat him. “Damn,” he said. “I’m out.”

Jack reached across the table for the pile of chips.

Billy raised a hand. “Hold on, my old mate,” he said.

“Piss off, Bubble––you ain’t never beating that.”

“Sorry,” he said with a grin that said he wasn’t sorry at all. “I am.” He put his cards face up on the velvet. “Full boat, kings over tens.”

A full house? Edward chuckled. Billy had played them both like a cheap fiddle.

Joseph and Lennie, long since out of the hand and undamaged, could afford to laugh. Jack and Edward were out of chips. It was just Billy, Joseph, Lennie and one of the businessmen left in the game.

Edward and Jack stepped away from the table and delivered their empty glasses to the bar.

Edward had quizzed Joseph about Jack McVitie as they made their way across Soho to the club. He had been involved with Joseph almost as long as Billy had. He had been born in Islington, and had had a difficult childhood, dropping out of school at an early age and falling into petty crime. He met Joseph in borstal in 1936 when both boys were twelve. Joseph had been sent down for burglary, Jack for stabbing another boy in the back with a pair of scissors. The two endured their inside year together, and, when they were released, they started thieving. Then, Joseph had gone to war while Jack had paid a dodgy quack to sign him off with asthma. He had spent the duration robbing whatever he could get his hands on and feeding the black market, but it had been hard graft and he had been glad to get cracking again with Joseph once he got back from the fighting. He was six foot two, heavily built, and crippled by vanity. He kept his balding thatch covered with his ubiquitous hat and had pushed a broken glass into the face of the last bastard who made a joke about it. That had done the trick. The subject hadn’t come up since.

“We were fooled,” Edward complained. “I could have sworn I had him beaten.”

“It’s a bad night when you let someone like Bubble gull you. He’s as subtle as a slap in the face. I must be drunker than I thought I was.”

“Might as well keep drinking then. Another one?”

“Why not. Whisky.”

Edward ordered the drinks and they took them to the large, deep-buttoned red leather Chesterfield next to the bar. They touched glasses.

“You’ve known Joseph for a while, haven’t you?”

Jack nodded. “Since we was nippers.”

“Do you know his family well?”

“Course.”

“You know George?”

“Well enough.”

“Everyone seems to be scared of him.”

Jack smiled at him as if he was a small child. “Have you met him yet?”

“Only briefly.”

“You want to be careful. His temper… Jesus.”

“Really?”

“You having a laugh? George Costello? Bloody right. Let me tell you a story.” Jack sipped his drink thoughtfully. “There was this one time, last year, just before Christmas, the family was having trouble with a bent slip out of West End Central. This bloke was on the take like they all are but this one was greedy, he wanted more and more, said he’d turn up the heat if he didn’t get another few notes when he stuck his hand out each month. So George meets him in the Greek dive on Old Compton Street, says he’s going to pay him what he wants but then he goes and pours a boiling hot coffee-urn over his head. In front of everyone. The slip got awful burns. In hospital for a week. They had to peel the skin off him, like an onion. He was bloody horrible to look at after.”

“He did that to a policeman?”

Jack nodded.

“And he didn’t get nicked?”

“Don’t be daft. The slip was out of order––his bosses would’ve given him a right going over. George has too many of them in his pocket. No-one wants to upset the gravy train.”

“And Violet?”

“If anything, she’s worse. It was her who set George on the copper. Between you and me, she’s a devious bitch and she ain’t got no scruples whatsoever. She might pretend to be sweet and light, but that’s only if you’re on the right side of her. She don’t do the sorting out herself, but then she don’t need to, not when she’s got a evil swine like George to sic on people.”

A shout of indignation signalled the end of the game. Billy had fooled Joseph, too, busting his aces with a trio of fours. They had each put ten pounds into the middle, winner takes all: a tidy amount. The businessman and Billy agreed a split of the pot, Billy gloatingly fanning himself with his winnings.

“Bugger this,” Joseph said, disgusted.

“Don’t be a sore loser,” Billy crowed.

They both joined Edward and Jack at the bar. The proprietor of the spieler was a man in a satin and quilted smoking jacket, of average height and Mediterranean colouring and with a pencil moustache that recalled Clark Gable. He opened a door at the far end of the room and led four girls inside. He brought over a humidor of excellent cigars and offered them around. “Gentlemen,” he said, his accent inflected with Latin accents, “allow me to introduce you to these delightful ladies.”

The four girls came over to them, each wearing a fine dress that shimmered in the subtle light, each of them smiling a knowing smile as if they were party to an excellent joke of which the poor chaps were hopelessly ignorant. They were superbly dressed, expensively and precisely made-up and with hair arranged in various fashionable cuts: one had a chignon, another the modishly popular Eton crop. Their décolletages were immodest and Jack whistled soft approval.

Billy made a show of sniffing his cigar––they were fine Cohibas––and placed it behind the ruffled handkerchief in his top pocket, patting it, grinning the whole time. “Alright, darling,” he said to the nearest girl, grabbing her slender wrist and tugging her closer. “Have a seat.” She giggled and allowed herself to be pulled down into his lap.