Jack Carter's Law (5 page)

“Evening, Mr. Carter,” he says.

“Evening, Leo. Who’s in?”

“The usual slags. The commoners. Nothing nice comes in till after midnight, not these days.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Not unless you’ve been keeping something from me.” Leo unlocks the inner door and lets me into Maurice’s room.

The lighting is predominantly blush pink, the wallpaper Indian Restaurant relief. There is a small bar fitted under a Moroccan arch. There are a dozen or so small round tables and towards the back of the room there is another, larger Moroccan arch and beyond this arch there are four booth seats upholstered in red leatherette and this is where Maurice holds court, but before I go over and pay my respects I make my way to the bar. The boys are three-deep at the bar, as if they’re huddling together for warmth, heads flicking this way and that like bantams on the lookout for corn, all the different shades of rinses as one under the sugary lighting, chained jewelry dulled by the atmosphere, buttocks and profiles just that little bit smoother in the dimness. And of course a straight arrival like myself causes the heads to flick and the lips to flutter even more. The whole place smells like the inside of a handbag. I manage to reach the bar without too much friction and I tell the drag barman to give me a vodka and tonic and while he’s getting it for me I look in the mirror behind the bar and in the mirror is the reflection of Peter the Dutchman.

“Buy us a drink, Jack?”

The reflection has dyed blond hair and purple tinted glasses. It’s wearing a coffee-coloured suit and a wide brown tie on a pink shirt. It’s smiling a great ice-cream smile using all the muscles you use for that kind of smile, but I know exactly what’s going on behind the purple tints. The barman waits for me to give him the nod and when eventually I do the reflection orders Campari, and sits down on the next stool but one.

“Haven’t changed a bit, Jack,” Peter says. And I say, “Who, Peter? You or me?” Peter the Dutchman giggles and says, “I’ll never change, you know that.”

No, I think, you’ll never change; you’ll always be the sadistic puff you always were. Peter’s the kind of queer who’s not content with getting his pleasure with the other boys; he has to take it out on the girls as well. Looking at him, I remember a little croupier girl he took home once. I saw her a couple of days afterwards, when she’d managed to summon up the courage to come to the club to pick up her money, because there was no way anybody marked like she was going to sit at a table and encourage the customers to part with their money. I remember her well. She’d even had to buy herself a wig because Peter had cut most of her hair off for her. But thank Christ I don’t have to have much contact with him. He’s a specialist but he won’t be doing any business with our firm as long as I’m working for it. He’s just done remission on five for going over the top with someone who got in his way, and with a bit of luck the next tickle he goes on he’ll do the same, and then it’ll be more than five he’ll be out of the way.

“Well,” I say to him, “if you ever do change, don’t waste your money on sending me a telegram.”

Then Maurice sweeps over and leads me across to his alcove, ordering my drink on the move, and I have to put up with Maurice’s brand of chitchat.

While I’m going through this routine with Maurice there’s a commotion behind us and I turn round to see that the door has just opened and let in Walter and Eddie Coleman and their wives, pissed up to their gills and all set to make their collective presence felt on the conventions of Maurice’s Club.

The Colemans, so to speak, are in the same line of
businesses as Gerald and Les. That is to say, they run clubs and various other legitimate and semi-legitimate businesses, but their real activity is directed towards the payrolls and the bullion and the banks and the import and export business. The only thing they don’t deal in on the scale of Gerald and Les is vice, and that’s because their patch is east and the Fletchers’ is west, and although they make a few bob out of it, the real money is in the west, and Gerald and Les have the west wrapped up. The Colemans would never attempt to upset that applecart, and at the same time it gets up their noses that Gerald and Les have a few vice strongholds in
their
territory and there’s sod all they can do about it, without starting the kind of aggro we can all do without.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Maurice, getting up and catching his medallion on the edge of the booth’s narrow table. “All we need. The royal family.”

He unhooks himself and gets to Walter and his crowd before they can start shoving their way through to the bar. He gives them his spiel about how nice it is to see them and how it’s been such a long time and why don’t they come and join him in the booth while Derek gets them all a drink and it’s not until Walter is halfway across the floor that he sees that I’m there, watching his progress.

Walter stops in his tracks and gives me his look and then he says to his missus, “Hear, Maur, I told you them stories was right. Jack Carter’s gone butch, whatever you used
to say.”

Maureen screeches her head off and repeats the very funny joke to Eddie’s wife, who finds it even funnier than she did.

“Hello, Walter,” I say. “Seeing where your boys go on their night off?”

He laughs at that but he finds it as funny as I found his remark.

The four of them struggle into the booth, Walter and Maureen with their backs against the wall, Eddie and his wife, Shirley, on the low stools opposite them.

Five seconds after they’ve sat down Walter says, “All right, then, where’s the fucking drinks?”

“Fucking place this is,” says Eddie, lighting the wrong end of his cigarette.

“Coming, coming,” Maurice shouts from beyond the throng at the bar.

“That’ll be the day,” Maureen says and they all fall about laughing again. Maurice ponces over again and apologises for the poor service and Walter blows him a kiss and there’s more laughter.

Then Walter focuses on me again and says, “So how’s your governors keeping then?”

“Nice and fat, like you two,” I tell him. “It’s only people like me that keep slim.”

“Up the bleeding workers,” Maureen says, crossing her legs so you can see right up to the maker’s name.

“No good flashing in here, darling,” Walter says. “The dirty looks won’t be the kind you’re wanting.”

“Don’t you fucking believe it,” Maureen says and swivels round on her seat and places her elbows on the table behind her and lifts her legs in the air and opens them wide. Shirley nearly pees herself and the crowd at the bar all have heart attacks.

“Here, you fucking ponces, don’t you know it’s rude to ignore a lady when she winks at you?”

This is too much for Shirley who slides onto her side on the booth seat.

Walter spins Maureen round in her seat and says, “All right, keep them on. We’ve all seen it before.”

“Not bloody lately you haven’t.”

“I’m the only one then. I’m telling you. Pack it in.”

Maureen starts swearing at him but she’s interrupted by Maurice arriving with the drinks.

“That slag behind the bar,” Maurice says, dishing out. “She’ll have to bleeding go.”

Walter slides up the seat towards me a bit and returns to the welfare of Gerald and Les.

“So they’re all right, are they? Prospering?”

I shrug. “I get my wages. That’s all I care about.”

“Wages.” Walter throws his head back and laughs. “Wages. The jobs you’ve been on.”

“What jobs would they be, Walter?”

“Never mind. So long as you’re happy.”

I have a few thoughts whether to suss Walter as to whether he’s got wind of Jimmy. He probably has, but there’s no reason why he should give me a helpful answer. The Colemans and the Fletchers are like steak and porridge. The only reason the four of them are still walking this earth is that they’re so shit scared of each other they’ve never had the nerve for a face-up. They leave that kind of thing to people like me; every now and again Gerald and Les, for some reason, real or imaginary, will send me round to have a look at one of Walter’s boys and every now and again some of Walter’s boys do the same in our patch. It keeps the four of them happy and chuffed with the publicity the papers give their apparent hardness. Not that they’re soft. They wouldn’t be the Fletchers and the Colemans if they were. It’s just that they’ve built up their legends so strong that they don’t want to put the reality to the test. So they try and fuck each other in every other way they can think of.

“Only one thing, though,” Walter says. “I hope you never wish you hadn’t turned me down.”

“Hello, what’s this?” says Maurice, who’s adopted the role of magnanimous old queen by drawing up a stool between Maureen and Shirley and draping his flowered arms round their shoulders. “Something I haven’t heard about?”

Walter gives Maurice the eyeball treatment and says, “We’re talking, son,” and because of the way Walter snaps up I realise he’s not as drunk as he appears to be. But of course that’s typical Walter. Even when he’s out with the family he has to keep a part of himself cold and wide open so that no one gets ahead of him.

He turns back to me and says, “Yes, my son, I hope you never wish you’d done that.”

What he’s talking about is the time when Gerald and Les had set about Charlie Akester with a couple of iron bars and the pair of them had got carried away and they’d had to go to the trouble of driving out to Epping and leaving Charlie in the forest. They’d had bad luck and some ramblers had found the grave and it had been touch and go whether Finbow was going to be forced to do Gerald and Les because of the size it had been given in the papers. Walter had been certain they were going to go down and he’d got to me one night at the Stable and in front of the overcoats that walk behind him he’d put his proposition. When I turned him down he’d nearly lost his bottle but that had been his own fault for bracing me in public. He could have stood it if he’d been discreet. And ever since then he’s been looking for the day when he can get his face back by seeing me nose down in a pile of shit. But the news for Walter, and he knows it, is that that day will never come, and the knowledge makes him even more screwed up than ever. But then what Walter doesn’t know is that the reason I turned him down was that if Gerald and Les had got topped there would have been no need for me to seek alternative employment. Audrey and me would have carried on the Old Firm, running it on their behalf, which with Gerald and Les away for twenties would have been the same as having a firm of my own. But since they didn’t, I can’t move, not that I’d ever move to Walter. I can’t move, work a firm on my own, because if I did Mal, Gerald and Les would make sure their law would put me away just to teach me a little lesson.

So I say to him, “There’s only three things in life I regret, Walter. Not belting my old man harder when I left home, not going back and giving him another one, and the fact that he’s dead so I can’t give him any more.”

Walter forces appreciation onto his face and pretends to forget his passing remark and says, “In that case let’s have a drink with your old man. Maurice, get some more in will you? Jack’s old man’s buying.”

Maurice begins to get up but Maureen, who’s been giggling with Shirley about something, says, “No, don’t you; let Yvonne de Carlo behind the bar fetch them.”

Maurice looks a bit apprehensive but he can’t afford to put a foot wrong in this company so he calls to the bar for the drag queen to bring the drinks over.

“What you up to, then?” Walter says to Maureen.

“Fun and games,” she says. “Fun and games. All right?”

Walter shrugs and downs what’s left of his drink. Eventually the queen totters from behind the bar and manages to make it over to the booth and comes to rest next to Maureen and plants the tray down on the table.

“Who’s having what?” Maureen says.

The queen tut-tuts and Maurice says which drinks go to me and Walter and Eddie and the queen mutters something under her breath about ladies.

“You what?” Maureen says.

The queen bends over the table and starts passing the drinks out without answering Maureen which of course is just what Maureen’s hoping for.

“I’m talking to you, not your arse,” Maureen says.

There is still no answer so Maureen says, “I’ll show you who the bleeding ladies are,” and shoots her hand straight up the queen’s skirt and she must have fastened on to whatever equipment has defied the scotch tape because the queen lets out a shattering shriek and tries to loosen Maureen’s grip but all she succeeds in doing is to overbalance across the table. Shirley reaches forward and snatches off the queen’s wig. The queen stops trying to undo Maureen’s grip and flails out to try and get the wig back but Shirley flings it high in the air and the wig bounces off the ceiling and lands on the floor near the bar.
Maureen must have flexed her fingers even more because the queen shrieks again and begins to slide off the table until she is on all fours and still Maureen doesn’t let go and the queen begins to crawl in the direction of her wig, Maureen straddling her, still grasping whatever it is she’s got hold of. The queen groans and squeals and tries to grab the wig but when she gets within reaching distance Maureen puts one knee in the small of the queen’s back so that the queen is no longer on all fours but face down on the floor with Maureen sitting on her. Then Maureen rips the back of the queen’s dress so that it’s completely in two from neck to hem, leans forward and picks up the wig and stuffs what she can get of it down the back of the queen’s drawers.