‘Your hair’s a bit long, Michael. Get it cut,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t look good. You’re a middle-aged man now, or bloody close.’
I thanked him for the compliment.
He stared at a young man with hair down to his shoulders, who was demolishing a Sweeny Todd meat pie a few feet away. ‘I can’t stand all these hefty young lads with Veronica Lake hairstyles. They want a sergeant-major to sort ’em out. I sometimes walk behind one and don’t know if it’s a man or a woman. No good for blokes at my age.’
‘If you have short hair these days you’re a suspicious character.’
He didn’t have that total confidence he once had. ‘You think so?’
‘You’d better stick to the business in hand.’
Having finished his breakfast he took out a cigarette case and lit up a fag, blowing smoke rings in the direction of two young women at the next table. ‘They’re lovely, aren’t they? I wouldn’t mind one for supper. Two, in fact. Do you know, Michael, I’m fifty-six, but I still like a feed now and then.’ His lean features, suntanned and clean-shaven, wrinkled into anxiety when he saw my umbrella hooked onto the chair. ‘Where did you get that gamp?’
‘Oh, I just picked it up.’
The sight of it worried him. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘You can lump it, then. It’s mine, and I’m very fond of it. I’ll love it till my dying day. Uncle Randolph used to go to Ascot with it before the War.’
‘Nicked it, eh? Looks fishy to me. Anyway, do you want to hear my story or don’t you? I know you do, and it’s good of you to answer my call so quickly. Michael will always stand by a friend in need, I said. He’s a good six-footer who not only looks after himself in a tight corner, but never lets an old pal down. I didn’t have firmer friends in the Sherwood Foresters. I don’t like the look of that umbrella, though. Where did you get it from?’
I told him.
‘That’s hardly calculated to set my mind at rest. It looks very suspicious.’ He scraped the last stains of custard from all three dishes. ‘Times have changed, Michael. You can’t be too careful these days. Ten years ago things were comparatively civilised. If you strayed from the straight and narrow all you might end up with was a nasty scar on the lee side of your clock, but nowadays you might get chopped into bits and sprinkled over a Thames bridge from a plastic bag. You vanish without trace. The seagulls gulp every morsel. London pigeons are starting to eat flesh. A few months ago I happened to be the unwilling witness of a fight between the Green Toe Gang and Moggerhanger’s Angels, and as a set-to it made the Battle of Bosworth Field look like a pub brawl at the Elephant and Castle. Things have altered, right enough.’
He plucked the small feather out of his hatband and put it into his mouth. ‘You’ve been away, so you don’t know how things are. How could you?’ He spat the bedraggled feather onto a plastic pie plate. ‘Well, it’s not too bad, either, because otherwise I wouldn’t have asked you to come down here and see me, would I?’
‘Wouldn’t you? Listen, I’ll go right off my bonce if you don’t tell me why you asked me to leave my cosily furnished railway station on such a foul day.’
Raindrops were running down the window. They broke out in separate places and made a dash for it, as I should have done, increasing in force and strength, born from stationary globules on the way down, like a crowd gathering on the way to a riot. Sometimes they travelled horizontally, lonely figures going a long way, till thwarted by the end of the glass.
‘I’ll tell you why I’m here, Michael, and why you’re here. I want your advice and support. A few months ago I was at a loose end. My girlfriend had left me, my mother had died, and I was running out of cash. I’d earned fifty thousand pounds bringing back a consignment of don’t-ask-what from Kashmir. I carried it in the false bottom of a butterfly collection, and got through the customs a treat. I had a beard (grey, unfortunately), little pebbledash glasses and a bush hat. I looked so theatrical they never thought I could be putting on an act. My false passport, fixed up by the Green Toe Gang, said I was a lepidopterist. I even had forged documents from the British Museum of Natural History. When those lads of the Green Toe Gang do something, they do it properly. No flies on them, Michael. No flies, no files, as they say. There aren’t any marks where they’ve been, either, not like on the rest of us.
‘It was the best job I ever pulled. Remember when we was smuggling gold ten years ago for Jack Leningrad Limited? Not a patch on that racket. At least this stuff doesn’t weigh a ton. I brought in a hundredweight, all nicely hidden. In the East a column of porters carried it, and at London Airport they provide them nice squeaky trolleys for you to zig-zag your stuff through the Nothing to Declare gates. A word of advice, though: always get the squeakiest trolley. It’s made for you these days. No rough stuff, or straining your muscles with three hundredweight of gold packed in your waistcoat pockets. No sweating with fear, either, as long as you act your part and keep a straight face, which we’re always able to do, eh? Get me another cup o’ tea and a custard, there’s a good lad.’
‘Fetch it yourself.’
‘I was brought up in poverty,’ he said, ‘at Number Two Slaughterhouse Yard. If I don’t stay at luxury hotels I feel deprived and underprivileged. You understand what I’m trying to say, don’t you, Michael?’
‘I think so.’
‘Then get me another cup of tea, then, and two custard pies, the ones with the pastry a bit burnt.’
His face had a pallor, and his eyes a shine, that suggested he was about to die. ‘What’s up, for God’s sake?’
He wiped a salt tear from his face. ‘I’m in danger. I can’t tell you – though I will. I’ll come to it. I’m not afraid of dying, not me, not after going through the war with the Sherwood Foresters. That Normandy campaign was very rough. I nearly got killed once or twice.’
‘I’ve heard that before.’ I’d never seen him so frightened. ‘Pull yourself together.’
He smiled. ‘Another custard and a cup of tea will see me right.’
I came back with his supplies, and watched him devour them. ‘Get on with your rigmarole.’
He wiped his lips. ‘That little courier job brought me fifty thousand quid, but money doesn’t stick to me, Michael. I like it too much to have it long. I give with my left hand, and grasp tight with my right, which means I get rid of it sooner than if I was just plain generous. I’m jittery with so much wadding in my pockets. I like to go round the clubs and have a good time. Shove fifty quid in a tart’s hand and not even go to bed with her, then give another woman a good pasting because she won’t let me have a feel. What’s life for if you can’t fix yourself up with an orgy now and again? Ever had three women in bed with you? You ain’t lived.
‘Anyway, I was broke, and then, providentially as I thought, I get this offer from the Green Toe Gang to be the driver of the third getaway car in a robbery. Now it ain’t a bank or post office or a wages snatch, but the flat of a former member of the gang who had half-inched a hundred thousand of their money, and now they wanted it back, meaning to deal with him later. The Green Toe Gangers had been told he was on holiday in St Trop, and had left his loot in a suitcase under his bed. You still get people like that, though to do him justice he thought it was just as safe where it was than in a bank with people like him and the Green Toe Gang around.
‘You can imagine how they trusted me absolutely? I’m a fool, Michael, always have been. You see, a few days before The Day one of Moggerhanger’s men, Kenny Dukes, that bastard whose arms are so long he ought to be in a circus, and who used to be chief bouncer at one of Lord Claud’s lesbian clubs, said Moggerhanger would like to see me. Well, I thought, I’ve nothing to lose, and let myself be taken to his big house at Ealing, and over a whisky and soda he persuaded me to drive the getaway car straight up north to a bungalow in Lincolnshire called Smilin’ Thru’ on the outskirts of Back Enderby, and deliver the cash there. Instead of me getting five per cent, which was what the Green Toe Gang had promised, he wou
ld give me half. Well, I ask you! Fifty thousand instead of five is quite a whack, and by the fifth whisky I’d agreed. I must have been stoned, pissed, and just plain crackers. Claud was in his element. He knew what he was doing. He must have had someone placed right in the middle of the Green Toe Gang to know their plans in such detail.
‘The actual robbery went smoothly. Nobody got knocked on the head. Not a gun was fired. Clockwork wasn’t in it. The individual always collaborates, Michael. He gets a glint in his eyes because he wants to be part of the gamble as to whether it’ll come off or not. It’s the regimented law-abiding swine who causes trouble when you ask him to be part of a team. Anyway, the case of money was put into my car by the second getaway car, which the blokes in it then abandoned and walked into South Ken tube station. I set off, cool as if I had just come back from Brighton and was on my way home to lie to my wife as to where I had been. I was supposed to deliver the money to a house in Highgate for the Green Toe Gang. But Moggerhanger had given me instructions to take it to Smilin’ Thru’, and when I stopped to wait at the red traffic light (I’ll never forgive that traffic light for being on red at that particular moment) I thought to myself: “A hundred thousand of real money is in the car, already checked and counted. It’s too good to hand over to the Green Toe Gang, or to Moggerhanger. I’ll keep it for myself.”
‘Ah, Michael, greed! That’s the downfall of the human race, and especially of yours truly. What commandment of the Good Book is that? One of them, I’m sure, so don’t tell me. Pure fucking greed, it was. I tell you I didn’t know what greed was till then. The idea struck me so strongly that I thought I would faint, hit another car, get pulled in by the cops and be marched off to the nick with the loot being shared out in the police car behind. But I pulled myself together. A blinding white light flashing GREED, GREED, GREED in front of my eyes got me back on an even keel. That sensation is described very well in one of Gilbert Blaskin’s novels, if I remember. It was on page one and I never got beyond it. But I was sweating, trembling, just how I was supposed to be. More than just a knee-trembler behind the dustbins in Soho would be mine for the asking with this amount of lolly. In a flash I wanted everything. You’re getting my drift, Michael? I wanted a yacht, a high-speed boat with six berths and me as Captain Codspiece flaring across the Channel to have a triple bunk-up in Cherbourg. Ah, what dreams! The likes of you don’t know one half.
‘Well, some bastard behind me in a powder blue minivan with a coat of arms on the side was blaring the horn to tell me that red had changed to green, and from thinking I would get my dusters out and give him short back and sides by breaking all his windows except the windscreen so that he would at least be able to drive off and get them repaired, I shot away, jet propelled by nothing else but good old-fashioned greed. Greedy but unashamed, that’s me.’
‘The material world is so dull,’ I said.
He winked. ‘It might be. But it’s got the best stories and the most money. I’ll never forgive myself, I told myself as I left that traffic light behind. And neither, I knew, would the Green Toe Gang or Lord Moggerhanger. You just don’t do that sort of thing. I’ve got two of the most vicious gangs in London (and that means the world) after my tripes to the last millimetre. They’ll even kill the tapeworm as it tries to escape along the pavement, poor innocent thing. I honestly don’t see how I can survive.’
‘Neither do I,’ I said.
‘Fortunately, or unfortunately I now think, I had my passport with me when I shot from the traffic lights towards Sloane Square. That was because I make it a rule never to go out without it, not even to cross the street for the Evening Standard wearing my dressing gown. I’m too old a hand to be caught out on something like that.’
I wondered how I would survive after having been seen talking to such a soft-headed vainglorious lunatic. ‘Stop boasting. Tell me what happened.’
He laughed, a tone of hysteria crossed by one of self-satisfaction. ‘You must admit it was a brave thing to do, or would have been if it hadn’t been so foolhardy. Daring and original, now I come to think of it. I just don’t like being a dead man, that’s all.’
‘Neither would I.’
‘But you won’t abandon me, Michael?’
‘First chance I get.’
‘I drove straight to Dover. I was no fool. In Canterbury I gave a lift to a young woman called Phyllis with two kids named Huz and Buz, and before we had got to Dover I’d invited them to come on a continental holiday. She lived in Dover, and had to go home to get their passports. We looked as if we were going on holiday as we got on the boat. Police and customs waved us in with a smile. I never realised I could look such a family man. I even let the matelot wash my car when he asked me, though I locked the boot before going on deck for a breath of air. I can’t tell you how good I felt. It was the high point of my life. Here was I, a man of fifty odd, with a car, a woman and two of the worst-behaved little bastards I’ve ever had the misfortune to lay my hands on, and a hundred thousand quid, on the way to lovely France. I felt like my old self again – rejuvenated, I think is the word.
‘I spent a week at Le Touquet, then put my temporary family back on the boat at Ostend with a few hundred to keep them in ice creams and lollipops for a week or two. I then set off via Brussels and Aachen down the Rhine motorway, nonstop to Switzerland, that wonderful refuge of runaways and political exiles with money. Once there I headed for Geneva, where I put the money into an account I’d opened years ago, and still kept a few francs in to hold it open. A nest egg for a cuckoo, but the only thing is I won’t live to enjoy it. That’s the long and the short of it, Michael.’
I offered a cigarette to calm his nerves. ‘But why did you come back? Why didn’t you head for Brazil like Ronnie Biggs?’
‘Have you got a cigar? Fags do my chest in.’
I gave him one. ‘The same old scrounger.’
‘I like generous friends. You’ll never regret your friendship with me, Michael, even though it might cost you your life. Greater love hath no man …’ He swung his head back, and hee-hawed like a donkey set free after twenty years going round and round the well. ‘Why did I come back here? You haven’t heard half the tale yet. I didn’t return of my own free will. You think I’m daft as well as stupid?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re wrong. No, you may be right. The trouble is, Michael, there’s no subtlety in my life, none whatsoever. I miss it sorely, and regret not having it. I feel what it is, and say that I must be subtle, and I spend hours deciding how I can be, but when the time comes, I act just like my old violent loud-mouthed greedy unlucky self. Anyway, to get back to Geneva, I was walking out of my hotel, on my constitutional to the lake. I like to keep up my walking. Five miles a day at least, one way or another. I even do a bit of running now and again. You never know when a sudden ten-mile sprint’s going to come in handy. There’s a gym I go to for boxing. I used to belong to a rifle club, just to maintain my marksmanship. I’m not that much of an idiot that I don’t keep myself up to scratch, Green Toe Gang or no bleeding Green Toe Gang.’
‘Get on with it.’
‘It was a lovely day. I was on top of the world. My cigar tasted like the very best shit, a newspaper was under my arm, my hat was set on my head at the usual jaunty angle – and then it wasn’t. Somebody knocked it off, and when I bent to pick it up, before lamming into them, I was lammed into by three of the biggest bastards you ever saw, and a shooter was stuck at my ribs. I didn’t have a chance. They made sure I’d got my passport, and before I could say my name was Jack Straw or Bill Hay or Percy Chaff or whatever it was at the time (I honestly forget) I was on the plane to London and no messing.
‘Everything looked normal as I walked to the check-in desk at Geneva, but there was one bugger behind me at four o’clock, and another chiking from eight, so that one false move and I’d have been bleeding all over the excess luggage labels. I went as quiet as a lamb. You see, they thought I’d left the money in England. Why? I’ll never know, a
lthough I can speculate. The chief of the Green Toe Gang employs one of the best psychologists to help out with any problems, personal or otherwise, that come along. Every consultation probably costs a cool hundred. Mostly it pays off. So I assumed that in my case they put the problem before him, and wanted to know where in his opinion I’d gone and what I’d done with the money. So after much sweating at the temples the twit comes up with this scenario that even the big chief of the Green Toe Gang couldn’t quibble about, since it had cost him so much. They traced me to Switzerland, which wasn’t very clever of them. I could have done the same. This Dr Anderson chap must have told them that before leaving Blighty I’d stashed the cash in a hiding place I knew of, and that they would never find it until they got me back to the Sceptic Isle and made me talk.
‘You see, Michael, the gangs aren’t so cosmopolitan as they were in our day. They’re too insular. They couldn’t credit the fact that I would leave with the money and be happy to potter around continental resorts of pleasure for the rest of my life. They’d probably fed into this psychologist’s computer-brain all the facts they knew about me, and he’d told them I had buried the cash under the floor boards of the house I was born in in Worksop – which had gone in slum clearance years ago. Well, when I said I’d left the money in Blighty they didn’t even listen. They knew, poor sods.
‘They got me back to London Airport right enough. Easy. There was a hire car waiting for us. All according to plan. When it comes to organisation, those boys are second to none.’
‘They should run the country,’ I said ironically.
‘They do, Michael, they do, believe me. Anyway, we steamed onto the M4 and I pondered on the fate they had in store for me. My imagination wasn’t up to it, though my expectations kept tormenting me. What those lads can do to you don’t bear thinking about, but they try the sophisticated way first by locking you in for a couple of days with Dr Anderson. It usually works. Not a mark on you. But if it doesn’t (and it wouldn’t with me) out comes the tool kit. I was just about ready to be sick, but keeping a good face on it, when the car slows, to curses from the driver. A car in front had braked and we were too close to swerve out and overtake, so had to brake with it. Another car behind homed in. We were topped and tailed, the oldest manoeuvre in the book. My brain clicked into action. When I’m not using my brain I think it’s turning into a cabbage and that I’m a walking case of senile decay. I can’t remember anything at times, or think through the simplest problem. But when it’s a matter of being in peril, a time when action is needed, I’m as clear as tissue paper and as quick as a snake.