Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (22 page)

‘And your guy has no idea where I could find Annan?’

‘Not a hope. And half the time he won’t be going by the name of Annan. Your best bet, according to my contact, is to work on the other two lesser mortals. As you can see, I got addresses for them. Annan’s not going to be Frank Lang … from what I gather about him the union would be too small time and labour-intensive, if you’ll pardon the pun. But Annan knows everyone in the business. He’d be the best way to Lang, if you could get him to tell you anything, that is.’

‘And you can’t tell me anything more about him?’

Archie shrugged. ‘No, not really. He was in the merchant marine during the war. Ship’s cook. There was some talk of him training as a chef, but he gave up the
petit pois
for petty larceny.’

‘Ship’s cook?’ I asked.

‘Aye … why?’

‘That’s what Frank Lang was supposed to have been. For a time, anyway.’ I looked at the names. I still had the sense that I wasn’t getting anywhere, but at least it was a new direction in which not to get anywhere.

The second name on the list was Edward Leggat, or Eddy McCausland, or Ted Cuthbert, depending on which way the wind was blowing and which old ladies he was tricking out of their life savings. The address I had for him, in a tenement
block in Raeberry Street turned out to be a dud, and I considered moving on to the third name on Archie’s list, but first I called St Andrew’s Square from a pay telephone. I was told Donald Taylor wasn’t on duty until the backshift and I hung up when asked for my name.

Leaving the Ford Anglia parked outside the hotel, I decided to take the trolleybus. Introduced seven years before and nicknamed ‘the Whispering Death’ by Glaswegians, the near silent, double-decker electric buses had frequently conspired with Glasgow’s dense smog to take a life.

I got off at the Broomielaw, a flank of ornate Victorian buildings that lined the Clyde, housing shipping companies and other dock-related businesses. The place I was looking for was in a totally different type of business, however.

The Pacific Club was a private cocktail bar tucked into the basement of a soot-blackened Broomielaw five-storey. It was one of those members-only joints where you had to sign in, meaning it was exempt from the licensing laws that applied to ordinary bars. Jonny Cohen had told me that he had gotten the idea from ‘business associates’ in Soho, London. I had never been there in the evening, only ever having graced it with my presence when meeting up with Cohen. The truth was that Handsome Jonny was very rarely to be seen in the place, unless by prior arrangement. Given Jonny’s current predicament, I knew he wouldn’t be there.

I was let in by a dinner-jacketed heavy who could have been Twinkletoes long-lost, and who defined exactly why some people called evening wear a ‘monkey suit’. His tailoring certainly wasn’t off-the-peg, given that the jacket’s arms had to be long enough to allow his knuckles to reach the ground.

The Pacific was a drearily South-Seas-cum-nautical-themed
place dressed in coconuts, crab-shells, anchors and ships’ life rings. In the corner was a palm-fringed bar with the words ‘HAWAIIAN HULA BAR’ above it.

I had done a lot of bad things in my life and, whenever I visited the Pacific Club, I found myself in fear for my mortal soul: if hell really was waiting for me, I knew this would take the form of an eternity’s membership to the Pacific.

There was a small, dark-haired guy behind the bar. He was jacketless but didn’t have his shirtsleeves rolled up and was lost in calculation of some figures in a ledger. He looked up when he realized I was across the bar from him and his face broke into a broad grin.

‘Lennox … how are you?’

‘I’m fine, Larry, you?’

‘What can I tell you? Business could be better, as Jonny keeps reminding me.’ Larry Franks was a good-looking Jew in his forties. He had an accent that most people in Glasgow would have taken for London but, if you listened closely, you would hear the traces of something much more distant. I liked Franks. Despite his employer’s other business activities and the company he kept, Franks wasn’t really a crook. He ran the Pacific as legitimately as he could, even if he knew the hostesses were running their own enterprises and allowed them the use of the private ‘Luau’ rooms. He seemed to be perpetually cheerful, one of nature’s optimists, which I greatly admired. Mainly because I knew why he kept his shirt sleeves rolled down.

‘Can I get you a drink, Lennox?’ he asked. ‘I’ve still got some of that Bourbon that Jonny got in for special.’

It was too early in the day for me, but the bourbon was something special, all the way from Bardstown, Kentucky. For a rye drinker in Scotland, it was like finding an oasis in the Sahara.

‘I’m sure the sun is over the yardarm somewhere,’ I said and smiled.

He poured me the bourbon and it went down smooth and easy.

‘What can I do for you, Lennox?’ asked Franks.

‘I need to get a message to Jonny and, seeing as things are
awkward
at the moment, I thought we could use you as …’

‘A messenger boy?’

‘Well, you know what I mean. I hope you don’t mind.’

Franks smiled. ‘Sure … What is it you want me to tell Jonny?’

‘I gave him a picture a week or so ago. A guy I’m trying to find.’

‘Yeah … I’ve seen it,’ said Franks. ‘Jonny’s been doing the rounds personally with it. Not anybody I’ve seen before, but Jonny said he was maybe more a dance hall type.’

‘That’s the one. There’s a slim chance that he’s maybe some kind of con-merchant and I’m trying to talk to other faces in the game to see if they can point me in the right direction. There’s a well-known long firm fixer called Eddy Leggat, and he could maybe help. Actually the feller I’m really after goes by the name of Dennis Annan, but he’s the invisible man, apparently, so Leggat’s a better bet to find. I’ve got another name too, so any pointer I can get on any or all of them would be good, but I’m concentrating on Leggat first. I thought there was a chance that Jonny might know of him or where I might find him.’

Franks took the stub of pencil from behind his ear and scribbled down the three names I gave him.

‘I’ll ask Jonny.’

‘Larry … do me a favour and wait until you see Jonny face-to-face. The way things are, I wouldn’t want you to discuss it
on the ’phone. That’s why I’m going through all of these hoops.’

‘’Course, leave it with me.’

I sipped at my Bardstown and we chatted about nothing in particular. Somehow we got onto current affairs. That November, almost any conversation with anyone anywhere in Britain had a tendency to turn to current affairs. Like everyone else we talked about the mess in Suez, how the Americans had reacted and everything that it was going to mean for Britain. The conversation naturally turned to the other crisis that was rapidly being side-lined: the revolt in Hungary. Or at least I turned it in that direction; Franks didn’t seem to have much to say and I detected, like a subtle shift of wind direction, a faint change in his mood.

‘It’s their problem,’ he said eventually, the smile gone. ‘They brought it on themselves.’

‘What?’ I laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a closet commie. You think they should lie down for the Ruskies?’

‘I was born in Hungary,’ he explained.

‘You’re Hungarian?’ I asked.

‘That’s not what I said. I said I was born in Hungary. I used to think I was Hungarian, but it was made very, very clear to me that I was mistaken.’

‘Ah …’ I said, and looked down into my glass, as if in it I’d find my way out of the corner I’d talked myself into.

Franks rolled up his left sleeve and held his forearm toward me. I had known there was a tattoo there, but had never seen it. The letter B followed by four numbers.

‘They gave me this, just to remind me of my error.’ There was irony but little bitterness in Franks’s tone. ‘June Nineteen-Forty-four. A present for my twenty-first birthday. I’m a
B
because I came in the second shipment, after they’d already done twenty
thousand
A
s. The Germans started rounding us up as soon as they moved in in March ’Forty-four. But their pals in the Arrow Cross and other Hungarian Nazis had made sure we were all ready for them.’

I realized I was staring too hard at Franks, searching his face for a lost youth. I had always taken him as being somewhere in his forties, a few years older than me. If he had been twenty-one in Nineteen Forty-four, he could only be thirty-three now. Along with a lot else, ten years had been stolen from him in a place I could name but could never understand.

‘Shit, Larry …’

‘Sorry, Lennox.’ Franks’s habitual good-natured grin returned. ‘I didn’t mean to make you feel awkward.’

I shook my head in disbelief that he was apologizing to me.

‘The only reason I’m going on about it,’ he said with a shrug, ‘is that I know the Hungarians are going through a tough time at the moment, but, frankly, I don’t give a shit – just like they didn’t give a shit when I was rounded up along with my family. What people forget is that the Hungarians started to pass anti-Jewish laws long before the Germans even got the idea. My father wasn’t allowed to study at university because of Horthy’s laws restricting Jewish places way back in Nineteen-Twenty.’ He paused and shrugged. ‘Sorry … I get a bit heated when people get all sympathetic about the Magyars. Just because the Germans took over in March Forty-four, and then the Russians in Forty-five, they’re treated as victims.’

As quick as we could, we moved on to more general chat about the weather and how we both wished we were sitting in the Melbourne sun watching lithe-limbed female athletes, and anything else inconsequential we could think to talk about.

I arranged with Franks to call back in the next couple of days
and left after a second Bourbon, which warmed me against the chill damp of the day. I took the trolley bus back into town and had lunch in Rosselli’s, keeping my Bourbon glow burning with a couple of glasses of rough Italian wine. I needed it, and not just because of the Glaswegian winter that glowered at me through the restaurant window. There were ghosts there too, the most vivid being the flashbulb image of Sylvia Dewar from the night before, her head caved in, and her husband’s plump baby face swollen and dark as he hung from the bedroom ceiling. And the blue-black numbers on Larry Franks’s forearm kept intruding. I thought that I had long ago been beyond the emotional reach of man’s-inhumanity-to-man-and-all-that-jazz, but maybe I wasn’t as immune to suffering as I had thought. Or maybe the immunity was wearing off.

Finishing my spaghetti and red wine, I skipped coffee and picked up the Anglia at the hotel. I had an appointment to keep.

That itch was still there between my shoulder blades. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been followed and I had avoided using the rental car anywhere I would be expected to be seen. I even took circuitous routes back to the hotel from my office, often taking me far out of my way. My meeting with Hopkins had shaken me, added to which was the odd feeling I had that I was trying to shake off my old life before starting a new one. The fact remained, however, that I still got an uneasy feeling that I was being watched. Stalked.

Jock Ferguson didn’t need to go to such extremes to find me. He called into my office the following morning, just before ten and just after I’d finished talking through the caseload with Archie. I had an old hunting knife that I’d had since I was a kid in Canada, and when Ferguson walked in, I was opening the mail with it.

‘I hope you never walk around with that on your person,’ said Ferguson, nodding to the hunting knife.

‘This? No, Inspector … that would be against the law. It was a gift from my Dad for weekend hunting trips, but I’ve given up the outdoor lifestyle since I moved to Glasgow. I only use it as a letter opener these days. ’

Ferguson and Archie spent a few minutes chatting while I
boiled up the electric kettle I kept on top of the filing cabinet. It had been Ferguson who had put me in touch with Archie in the first place and I knew that, somewhere along the line and before Ferguson had begun his ascent of the ranks, the two had served together as beat coppers.

After Archie left I sat drinking black tea with Ferguson and chatting casually; which was a ploy, because Ferguson wasn’t the type of friend, or copper, just to drop in on you while passing. Or chat casually.

‘What happened with my buddy, Sheriff Pete?’ I asked, as much to divert him as anything: I didn’t give a damn about the bad little bastard.

‘He’s locked up nice and tight, for the moment,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ve got him for a theft from a colliery in Lanarkshire. Smalltime stuff but enough to keep him under lock and key. While we’re on that subject, the night you got into a tussle with him, who was the woman involved?’

‘The girl he was manhandling?’ I asked, confused. ‘I haven’t a clue. I don’t even know if he actually knew her or if they’d just bumped into each other in the ballroom or on the way out. Why?’

‘Oh, nothing. I just wondered if you knew who she was.’

‘I’m aware I have a certain reputation in Glasgow, Jock,’ I said, ‘but, believe it or not, I don’t actually know every beddable woman in the city.’

‘Sure …’ he said and we danced about a little more. It took him five minutes of carefully aimless chat to get to the punchline, which he went out of his way to make sound as casual as possible.

‘We’re just putting the initial report to bed on the Dewar murder-suicide,’ he explained. ‘Tying up any loose ends.’

‘Oh?’ I said with equally forced casualness. I couldn’t think what ends I had left in my statement, loose or otherwise.

‘Yes …’ He stretched the word. ‘Remind me … you got the call from Dewar just after lunchtime, and he was distraught … agitated … is that right?’

‘Like I told you before, Jock. Several times, if I remember. He told me he didn’t know what to do or where to turn. I said I would come up and discuss his case with him that night.’

‘How did he get your name and number?’

‘That I don’t know. I didn’t ask.’

‘But you didn’t know him previously?’