Jack Carter's Law (3 page)

“Oh yes? Well if there’s anything you’ve overlooked then phone me or Gerald or Les before ten o’clock tonight. Now take your pigging money and let me get out.”

I let go of the envelope and it falls in Cross’s lap. While he’s smoothing out the envelope I open the door and rain spits into the cab. I look at my watch. Sod Gerald and Les. They can wait for an hour. I slam the cab door behind me.

--

Audrey

I
’M LYING BACK IN
bed, smoking, and I say to Audrey who I’ve just lit up in more ways than one, “Isn’t it about time you had your nails cut,” and she says to me, “Leave off, you know that’s one of the bits you enjoy best,” and I must admit she’s right, only of course I don’t admit it to her. I take a few more drags and look down my body and at her body which is naked except for the half-slip which, time being of the essence, we never got round to taking off. The slip’s all twisted up round her waist except for a little bit of lace edging that’s overlapping the top few curls of her pubic hair. I reach down and pull the slip away so that she’s all exposed and she gives me a look. “Do me a favour.” I tell her, “Not yet, what do you think I am, James Bond?” She pulls a face. “All it is,” I say, “is that it’s a long time till your next visit to the hairdresser’s, isn’t it, and I like to remember,” and she says, “Funny.” At first I don’t tumble and then when I do of course I have to laugh.

I finish the cigarette and get off the bed and walk over to the table where we’d left the vodka and ice and slices of lemon and I liven up my half-empty glass and ask Audrey if alcohol might not be an anticlimax after what we’ve just been through and she says, “What about you then?”

“I’ve got to steady my nerves down after that,” I tell her and she says, “Well, you’d better give me one because I’ve got to steady mine down because I’ve got to phone Gerald. I’m late.”

“I’ve got to phone him too,” I tell her. “I should have been at the club an hour ago.” I make her drink and take it over to the bed picking up the phone on the way. Audrey takes a drink but she doesn’t touch the telephone, just stares at it, as she lies there propped up on her elbow. “Someone, somewhere wants a phone call from you,” I say, but all I get for that is “Piss off.” I shrug and take a drink and sit down on the edge of the bed. “You know what would happen, don’t you,” she says. I know what’s coming but I don’t say anything. “I mean,” she says, “if Gerald ever got to know about us.” “Yes, I know,” I tell her. “We’d both be dead.” “No,” she says. “You’d be dead, you’d be the lucky one. What he’d do to me would be much more interesting. I mean, Gerald really enjoys going to work.” “I know all about Gerald,” I tell her, lighting up another cigarette. “You think I don’t know about that?”

“I must be bleeding barmy,” she says, and I tell her yes, she must be bleeding barmy. “I mean,” she says, “doesn’t it worry you?” “ ’Course it worries me,” I tell her. “What do you think?” “Well, you never seem to,” she says. “No,
well . . . ”
I tell her. Then there’s a long silence and after that she picks up the phone and dials the number. I lie back on the bed and rest my head on her stomach. You’ve got to give her credit for being a great little performer because when the receiver’s lifted at the other end she delivers “Hello sweetheart,” just the way she does whenever she phones me. I can hear Gerald’s reply even from where I am. “What the fucking hell do you want?” he says. “Oh, bleeding charmin’,” Audrey says, her hand over the receiver, “just bleeding charming.” “Look,” he says, “didn’t I tell you I’m having a meeting all afternoon? Didn’t I tell you that?” I transfer my cigarette to my other hand and reach up and start massaging Audrey’s breasts. She tries to push my hand away but her being propped up on one arm and holding the receiver in her other hand she doesn’t have much joy. I carry on with the therapy and she says, “Yes, I know, darling, but I had to phone and tell you why I’m going to be a little late because I know how you worry.” “All right, let’s have it,” Gerald says. “So why are you going to be late?” I take hold of her arm and pull her forward so that she overbalances off her elbow and falls with her breasts resting on my lower stomach. She mouths silent rage at me but Gerald’s voice rasps down the line and she has no time to recover her previous position. “The thing is,” she says, “I ran into Yvonne in the hairdresser’s and what with Harry just being sent down she wanted to talk, you know, so I’m back at hers now. God knows how I’ll get away, you know what she’s like . . . ” “Fucking Harry,”
Gerald says. “A right bright bastard he is. Serves him bleeding right, don’t it? I mean, going out with those fucking
amateurs, fucking ponces . . . ” Gerald stokes himself up on the subject of Harry and I slip my hand behind the back of her neck and push her head down until I can feel the warmth of her breath tickling the tip of my prick and the closeness of her breathing begins to take effect because she looks from it to me and her expression changes and a different kind of wickedness appears in her eyes and she lays the receiver on my belly, the mouthpiece against my prick-end, takes me in hand and begins to go to work, all the time looking into my eyes, and all the time Gerald’s barking voice reverberating through the plastic against my skin. Eventually Gerald’s voice stops and Audrey puts her mouth next to the mouthpiece, her lips brushing my tip, and she says, “I know, darling, you were right, you were always right about Harry, especially when you got rid of him. I mean, how could you trust a man who’s stupid enough to trust those ponces, you could see it coming,” and Gerald says, “Too fucking true, he was a berk.” Audrey says, “Anyway, I’ll be back as soon as I can. If I’m back too late tell Ann-Marie no later than seven with the kids, you know she spoils them,” and Gerald says, “Right,” and
she says, “How about a kiss, then?” “For Christ’s sake,” Gerald says, “you know who I’ve got here?” “I’m not going to let you go without a kiss,” she says. “Oh, all right,”
Gerald says and makes a kissing noise down the phone, and she fakes one back, only her lips, when she purses them, are kissing me, and like I say, not on my mouth. The line goes dead and she carries on with the kissing.

After Audrey’s gone I have a shower and do myself a steak and salad. Gerald and Les can wait a bit longer. They’re not to know what time I met Cross. While I’m eating my steak and having an extra couple of drinks I watch television but I really don’t take anything in because I’m thinking of what Audrey said about being barmy carrying on together. I’d had that thought ever since we’d first tumbled. But the alternative, rowing out, just wasn’t on as far as I was concerned. Not since that very first time. Every bird I’ve ever had was just so much cold meat compared to Audrey. And in any case, trying to row out from a bird like Audrey would be just as dangerous as the present situation. The shit would fly whatever I did. So as usual I give up thinking about it and put on my gear and start out for the club.

--

Gerald and Les

T
HE RAIN HAS STOPPED
and the greasy streets are full of tourists trying to turn up the naughty bits of London. I get out of the cab and unlock the sober sage-green painted doors and Alex is standing there behind the lobby’s glass doors, his teeth highlighted whiter than ever beyond the glass’s bright reflection. I push open the glass doors and Alex helps me off with my coat.

“Anything?” I ask him.

“Nothing yet, Mr. Carter. A small game in the Green Room but it won’t get any bigger. The rest are just drinking.” Up above me there is the faint sound of Motown-style music.

“All the girls reported?”

“All of them,” Alex says.

I walk over to the plain door next to the cloakroom and unlock the door and open it and slide back the cage doors of the private lift and press the button. The lift only has one stop and that’s Gerald and Les’s penthouse office on the top of the club. The lift smells like the inside of a stripper’s G-string which isn’t surprising considering the amount of slag traffic it’s carried since my bosses, the Fletcher brothers, had it installed eighteen months ago. You’d have thought Gerald would have had enough of slags considering the route by which the two of them arrived at the top of the building that was now the centre of their operation. But not Gerald. Slags to him are like scotch to an alcoholic. Not that Les is a total abstainer but more often than not he’ll pour himself a drink and watch Gerald get on with it, with the kind of mild interest someone else would watch a couple of kittens at play. Les lives his life more in his head than Gerald does.

The lift stops and I get out. I’m in a small windowless hall. There is only one piece of furniture, a leatherette swivel armchair, and sitting in the armchair is Duggie Burnett. He’s wearing a hound’s-tooth suit—two buttons with side vents, narrow trousers with deep turn-ups—a yellow waistcoat, a Viyella check shirt and a plain woolen tie. He’d look like something straight off the early-morning downs at Newmarket if it wasn’t for the fact that his nose is on sideways and the rings he wears on each of his fingers aren’t there just for show. At the present moment he has a serviette tucked in his waistcoat and he is genteelly balancing a plate of sandwiches on his knees. The sandwiches have been daintily cut and served up with slices of tomato on top and a patterned doily underneath but Duggie is absorbed in gently taking the sandwiches apart and placing the salad stuff to one side and picking up the slices of ham with his fingers and eating them that way. Each time he places a slice in his mouth he thoroughly cleans the grease off his fingers with his handkerchief. I stand there watching him for a minute or two before I say anything to him.

“And supposing I was Wally Coleman and six hundred of the fellows that walk behind him?” I ask Duggie. “What would that make you and Gerald and Les by now?”

“But you ain’t,” says Duggie, not looking up from the disemboweled sandwiches. “If you was you’d be headfirst down that lift shaft with a bullet up your arse, no trouble.”

I grin at him.

“All right,” I say. “Let them know who’s here.”

He wipes his hands again and picks a handset off the wall next to him.

“Jack’s here,” he says, and puts the handset back on its cradle.

The door opposite the lift slides open and as I go in I say to Duggie, “Incidentally, it’s on the news a gorilla got out of Regent’s Park Zoo this afternoon. Haven’t caught him yet. If I was you I’d stay at home tonight.”

The door slides to behind me. I’m in another hall, bigger than the last. This hall has furniture, Regency repro, and gold-framed pictures, but there still aren’t any windows. The hall is lit by a single light set dead centre in the ceiling. There is another door, a replica of the one that is the entrance to the club, painted the same colour. I press a button on the wall next to the door and a second or two later the door is opened by another mug called Tony Crawford, the only difference between him and Duggie being that Tony’s gear is ten years out of date and that he’d eat the ham and the bread and the doily and the plate.

“Right, piss off, Tony, this is a meeting now,” says Gerald.

Tony closes the door behind me.

The room I am in is all Swedish. It’s a big room, low-ceilinged, and when Gerald and Les had it built on top of the club they’d let a little poof called Kieron Beck have his way with the soft furnishings. Everything about the room is dead right. The slightly sunken bit in the middle lined with low white leather settees with backs reaching the normal floor level, the honey-coloured polished floor itself with its scattered furs, the office area over by the window which runs all the length of one wall, the plain white desk that is worth half an Aston Martin, the curtains that make a noise like paper money when you draw
them—everything is perfect. The only things that look out of place are Gerald and Les. So much so that they make the place look as if you could have picked all the stuff up at Maple’s closing-down sale.