ELEPHANT MOON (15 page)

Gregory looked around at the others, their shirts swelling with pride and anger. Then Mosley read out a list of Red bastards, people who had beaten up British Fascists: ‘John Feigenbaum, Hyman Goldstein, Barnett Bercow, Michael Goldberg’ – they all laughed at that – and then he had a go at the Little Men in the House of Commons ‘hysterically seeking to protect the negroid savage of Abyssinia… who lisp of China and Timbuctoo, on the rare occasions when their mouths are not stuffed with high living at the luxurious tables of the oppressors of the British people.’

On and on he went, his tone getting darker and more powerful with every word: ‘I am going to tell you who your masters are. Who backs the Conservative Party? Who but international financiers? They are the people who put razor gangs on the streets. Who finances the Labour Party? The Little Jews in Whitechapel who sweat you in the sweat shops.’

He hadn’t finished: ‘Let us bring down our righteous anger against the festering scum who by their cowardice and sloth have reduced the British Empire to a moribund thing, in peril of annihilation.’

How they roared their hate!

Afterwards, when Mosley and his gang had marched off, Syd introduced him to another man, a bantam cock, his face carved by a razor-slash, chain-smoking, wearing a scruffy mac, thin, intense. He had a funny voice, posh, educated but peculiar– high-pitched it was, very nasal. But he was very sure of himself. He would stare at you, mocking like, stern and cruel then he’d flash a sudden smile at you. His whole face would light up. Eddie was only a kid, but even then he found William impressive. They always called him William – not Billy. No one called him Billy. William told him that they knew someone down the docks who would put in a good word for him about getting a job as an assistant on the cranes. ‘But fair’s fair,’ he said. ‘We expect you to do something for us by way of return.’

So that’s how he became a runner for the Black Shirts. The Yids and the Commies were on to him pretty soon. They had people hanging out on the street, outside the offices of the British Union of Fascists, watching who went in and who went out. They clocked him fast. So pretty soon he started carrying a knife with a switchblade seven inches long. He showed it off to Syd and William and the others, and they all went ‘woo’ and acted unimpressed.

But he’d had the last laugh.

Syd gave him a pot of red paint and the two of them went out to the Yid areas of the East End, and started painting
Perish Judah
on the alley walls. Then this group of about five Yids came for them and they were in real trouble and Syd was about to run for it when Eddie, cool as mustard, flicked his knife out and started slashing the air and all the Yids ran for it,
pell-mell. So, pretty soon, Eddie, young as he was, started to get a reputation. Some of the others were afraid of trouble, would run away. But not him.

One night, a lock-in down the Bucket of Blood, they brought in a piglet, squealing its head off it was, and fast as lightning. They blocked off all the exits and then they taunted him to see whether he could use his fancy knife to kill it, taking bets.

He’d never forget it. The boozy atmosphere and the cigarette smoke and the men in their black shirts all shouting and screaming at him and the piglet. They let the piglet go and the men started shouting: ‘Kill Judah, kill Judah,’ and he missed it oh, a dozen times, slashing the air – and then finally he cornered the shrieking pig and he feinted his left fist and the pig ran to the right and he jabbed and sliced a line across the animal’s neck like a knife through bleeding butter. The sawdust on the floor of the pub thickened blood-red. What he liked the most about it was the speed of it, the ease with which he could deny life. Here was this thing, alive and screeching its runty head off, and one slash and the noise stopped and everything went dead quiet. It was – what’s the word? – satisfying. After that the others treated him more like an adult, as if you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. He liked that.

A few days later they were in the Bucket when Syd and William called him over to their table. He was doing well down the docks, not just fetching tea and screwdrivers, but watching how they operated the cranes – he was always a fast learner - and making more money than that bastard Uncle Stan, and he was quite the little mascot of the Black Shirts; even old Mosley would smile at him and he hardly smiled at anyone, being the Leader and all. So the two of them showed him a photograph of a man in a newspaper. It was the same Yid who had spoken at the Communist meeting, the funny one with the gob on him. Eli Finkelstein. They looked at the picture and old Syd grinned and said: ‘You don’t fancy doing what you did to that pig to this pig, do ya?’

‘What’s in it for me?’ Because that was how the world worked. Syd smiled and said, ‘Because you effing love your country.’

So then he started watching out for Eli, but taking pains to do it right. Eddie’s blond hair and his youth made him stand out in the crowd, so he got it cut short and took to wearing a cap and an old man’s overcoat. In the cold weather, you’d have to look twice to recognise him. They’d given him a leaflet advertising the next Commie meeting, place, date, time. Nothing to it really. Long before it started he just hung around on street corners, doing nothing, just watching. A good watcher, young Eddie, that’s what they said about him. It looked as though not that many would turn up, but shortly before the meeting was due to start loads of them arrived, all sorts, Jews, English, posh types with glasses, even a few blackies and Indians. He hung back. There were far too many around to do anything.

 Yack, yack, yackety yack. God, they talked. All talk and no action, the Commies. Snowflakes began to fall, not much, but enough. The bitter weather made him want to pack it in, just duck into the Bucket and forget all about it. His hands were gnarled, frozen with the cold. But he knew he couldn’t. He knew that if he didn’t do this for them, there would be trouble; they wouldn’t let him forget it. After hours of it, the meeting finally broke up and they started to dribble out into the fresh air.

There! Eli Rosenthal, walking home. Tall guy, thin, his hair half bald, brain-box he was. He didn’t have far to walk, just a few streets away from the meeting in Poplar, down an alley, underneath the railway arches. Gregory had hung back so much he almost missed Eli going into his house. Number thirteen. This Jewess opened the door. Black dress, hair piled up, gorgeous she was, beautiful body. Meaty. Lucky bloody Eli, but not lucky for long, my son, not lucky for long.

A week later, the same routine, the same meeting. Long before it was over, Gregory ducked away from the place where he could keep watch on the meeting and went to the
railway arches. He’d picked his spot very carefully, creeping through a hole in a wire fence, a good 100 yards from the nearest house, sheltered from the weather by the railway above, dark in the shadow of the arch.

But this time Eli came home with his bloody Jewess, didn’t he? He couldn’t do it with a woman around. He just stayed in the shadows, feeling a bit of a sap. But what could he do? If he tried anything, she would have screamed the place down.

William and Syd had a real go at him about it. When he told them that he couldn’t have done it because of the Jewess, Syd looked angry and disappointed, but William seemed to ignore him. It was that coldness that got him down. He liked being useful, he liked being needed.

The following week, as chance would have it, there was no bloody meeting. He took to hanging out underneath the arches, in his favourite shadow spot, waiting for Eli to come home. He had a really loud click-clack footstep. Unmistakeable it was – and that would mean the end of him. But when it came to it, everything went wrong.

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. It was Eli all right. He held still, intent, listening for another’s footsteps. No, just Eli, no one else.

Eli turned the corner and was now walking under the railway arches. Three, two, one. The Jew passed him hiding in the dark and he began to move but a bloody cat, as black as coal, chose that very moment to wriggle out under his feet and trip him up and he half-fell, half-stumbled and the sound caused Eli to look round to see him come towards him, knife in hand. So Eli started to run. But Gregory was fast, dead fast, so he got a slash in, side on, ripping a slice across the man’s face and eye, blood spurting everywhere, but with that bloody great voice of Eli’s, he started booming, ‘Rebecca, help!’

It was enough to wake the dead. Doors started flying open up the street, light spilling out to the pavement. Eddie raced after him with the knife but Eli was running for his life,
running like he’d never run before, still screaming, ‘Rebecca, help, help!’ It was more like a squeal, like that bloody pig. The noise wrong-footed him. He didn’t know whether to go after him and finish the job, or leg it. On reflection – oh, and he had plenty of time for that, later – he should have legged it. But he didn’t. He started running after him but he’d waited far too long and Eli had a good twenty yards on him. Still, he was faster and he made good ground. Eli got to his house and the door opened and he half-fell in the doorway and Gregory stabbed him hard in the back of the neck and curved the knife round his throat.

And then, blackness.

He should have killed her when he had had the chance. She only brained him with a candlestick, one of them funny Jewish ones with seven candles, didn’t she? As heavy as a cosh it was, knocked him clean out. Came to in the police cell, staring at the Old Bill, and they didn’t like the look of him one little bit.

William and Syd had done all right by him. Or they let him think they had, which was not quite the same thing. They got him a la-de-da brief, which was good, but in return they asked for their names to be left out of it. The trial was comical, really. He never mentioned William or Syd, but spoke about some Jewish brethren who had promised him £250 to kill Eli because they wanted him dead. The brethren had fallen out over some gold ring with diamonds on it. No one fell for it.  The Jewess did for him. She got up in the witness box and said she had recognised him, hanging around their street. When she had mentioned seeing him to Eli, he had told her: ‘Oh, that’s the little blond Fascist. They like blond boys, the Fascists. The Aryan ideal. Funny thing is, he came to one of our meetings and he seemed very attentive. But next time I saw him he was wearing a black shirt and running errands for William Joyce.’ When the Crown’s brief asked her about the death of Eli, she sobbed and sobbed and the women on the jury cried too and he knew he was a goner. Would he get off? Would he bollocks.

The jury took about five minutes before they came back. ‘Guilty.’ The judge looked as though he would have loved to put the black cap on, but he talked about a new law that had been passed, preventing anyone under the age of eighteen from being sentenced to hanging. So Eddie got life instead, at His Majesty’s Pleasure. The Jewess was crying her eyes out the whole time. Silly bitch. If he had killed her too, then he wouldn’t have been in this mess. When he went down, he started whistling his tune, ‘Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements’. To show them he didn’t care.

William and Syd visited him in the nick. He’d worked it out by then. They started talking on in their way, but he cut them short: ‘I know why you picked me. It was a set-up. Because I was so young, you knew they couldn’t hang me, and that meant a lot less trouble for you lot. You got rid of Eli, the best Commie speaker in the whole of the East End, and you didn’t get that much bother because it was only a mad kid that did it.’

Syd tried to deny it, to shake his head, but William smiled to himself, sheepish like, as if he had been smoked out. He got up and left. William never came to see him, after that.

Being inside wasn’t as bad as they said it was. He missed the river and the sunshine and the girls. Your skin went grey inside. The rest of it wasn’t too grim. Better than listening to Uncle Stan doing his mum at night. The others kept pretty much away from him. They knew what he’d done and some of them were scared of him.

The Scrubs wasn’t so bad. But you had to look after yourself. They put a fat Yid bastard into his landing, who was gobby and knew that he’d been a fascist who’d knifed old Eli. So this Fat Yid goes yackety-yack about him. Eddie got hold of a fork and he broke off two of the prongs leaving just the one, and cornered him and told him any more from him and he’d be blind in both eyes. Then he shoved the prong in the Fat Yid’s right eye. Fatty howled the bloody nick down. The screws came to take Fatty to hospital, screaming his head off he
was, and Eddie just whistled ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and they all knew who’d done it but nobody said a bloody word to the screws.

After that, he overheard one of the screws say that he, Edgar Gregory, was the coldest bastard villain he’d ever met. He liked that. No relaxing of the muscle or the mind.

And then came the war. He was just the right age and he wanted to fight, anything to get out of the nick, and eventually they let him out again, to kill for King and Country. The ship out East was a holiday after the Scrubs. They had a wireless and they tuned into Radio Berlin and there, large as life, was old William, saying, ‘Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling,’ and he told all his shipmates that he’d used to be a painter for Lord Bloody Haw-Haw, touching up the woodwork in the East End. He didn’t tell them the whole story about what he actually painted–
Perish Judah
and that, and how it all ended up, mind. That would have been stupid.

Even here, in this jungle, they hadn’t found him out. That was the thing about killing. Once you’d done one, there was no point in stopping. Besides, he liked it.

Just before nightfall, a stroke of luck. Not that it felt like it at the time. The sun had gone inside the green bubble of jungle, and he’d put up his hammock and was having a quick snooze, getting in a few moments of shut-eye before dinner. That was when he felt something slide over his ankle, heavy, silken on his skin, and slowly wander up his thigh. Eh up, he thought, but it wasn’t right, didn’t feel like a woman, too slithery or whatever.