The wooden boxes remained in my room for three days and having nothing else to do I decided to find out what was in them. I succeeded in prising open the lids of several boxes by using the spoon I’d been given to eat my food.
The boxes were full of silverware, packed in sawdust. Bowls, cups, cutlery, cases, candelabra—all kinds of fine things.
I knew already, of course, that Moira was involved in smuggling alcohol. She and her people were gangsters and quite prepared to have people beaten up if they wouldn’t do what she wanted. So my first thought was that the silverware in the boxes must be stolen goods.
204Carl, Kevin and Bernie came down one evening to pick up the boxes and I immediately showed that I was willing to help them. Carl had clearly been reckoning on that as he’d brought a long chain with a padlock on each end.
He attached one end around my neck, handed the other end to Bernie and said, “Lock this chain to your belt so the ape doesn’t run away.”
Bernie didn’t look too happy with the idea but did what he was told. He and I had soon carried all the boxes up from the cellar and stowed them in the back of a lorry parked inside the iron gates of the backyard.
Gordon was sitting behind the wheel reading a newspaper. Looking over his shoulder I could see that the paper was called the Noon Record and consisted of page after page of tables and lists. I’d seen papers like that before, both in Lisbon and in other cities. The Noon Record was a newspaper for people who gamble on horses.
Carl and Kevin got in and sat beside Gordon in the cab while Bernie and I had to find what space we could among the boxes in the back. Then we set off.
The flickering light of the gas lamps along the street picked out cars and pedestrians in the grey fog. I did my best to work out the direction in which we were travelling. We drove west through the city and eventually came to an industrial area 205and a fast-flowing river lined with big corn mills. This was the River Kelvin—I remembered that from the street map the Chief had bought.
Gordon parked on a wharf down by the water. In the darkness around us we could see derelict boats propped up on empty oil drums. A faint light was showing in the windows of a ramshackle workshop that seemed to be a boatyard. The sound of a steam engine running at low revs came from somewhere in the neighbourhood.
I tried to stand up but the chain held me back. Bernie didn’t budge. He was clinging tight to the lorry and staring down at the rushing, gurgling river running past us in the darkness.
“On your feet, Bernie! We don’t have time for your fears tonight,” Gordon said with a sigh of irritation.
Kevin snorted. “Only babies are afraid of the water, you know that, don’t you, Bernie?”
Bernie didn’t move a muscle.
Gordon went up to him and spoke quietly in his ear. “What’s Moira going to say about this, do you think? She’s going to be angry with you again. Very angry. Just like last time. And the time before that. And you know…”
On hearing Gordon’s words Bernie managed to pull himself together. He stood up, stiff and clumsy, and we began passing the boxes down to Carl and Kevin. 206
The engine we could hear in the darkness turned out to be a steam launch moored to the wharf. A scrawny man chewing on a pipe was sitting in the stern, ready to cast off.
“Evening, skipper,” Gordon said, and the man in the boat responded by putting a finger to the peak of his cap.
Once all the boxes had been moved from the back of the lorry down into the steam launch, Kevin, Carl and Gordon used a mixture of threats and elbows to get Bernie aboard. The huge man reluctantly went along with it, but his panic showed in his eyes.
A short while later we were on the move. The River Kelvin flowed into the great Clyde just a couple of hundred yards farther downstream. The launch began rolling and pitching heavily in the waves as the skipper set a westward course towards the sea.
I shivered in the icy night breeze out on the river. Where were we going and what would happen when we got there?
Bernie was sitting hunched between two of the boxes on the deck of the launch. He was trembling, not from cold but from sheer terror. His face was deathly white and cold sweat glistened on his forehead. There is nothing unusual about people being afraid of going out in boats, but I’ve never before met anyone as terrified of the water as Bernie, big man that he was. 207
The fog grew denser and the bell-buoys marking the deep-water channel sounded mournfully across the water. After an hour or so the skipper cut the steam and we could just pick out the north shore of the Clyde through the fog. The few lights visible on shore were weak and scattered. Our skipper struck two sharp blows on the brass bell and almost immediately it was echoed by a second bell answering out in the night.
Our skipper changed course and a minute or so later a dark silhouette loomed up on our starboard side. We glided slowly in alongside the other vessel, a large barge that stank of fish. It lay at anchor, sails furled, a worn and sodden flag hanging from the rigging. It looked as if it was the Irish tricolour.
Men from the crew of the barge helped tie us alongside. Gordon climbed aboard the other vessel and shook hands with a stout man wearing oilskin trousers, a thick woollen jersey and a battered skipper’s cap. We began transferring the wooden boxes from the launch down into the hold of the barge. The stench down there was almost unbearable and in the light of the oil lamp we could see that the planking was slippery with fish blood and offal.
Once the last box had been moved, the mooring ropes were untied and Carl pushed us off with a boathook. The skipper of the launch set the regulator to forward and the barge quickly vanished aft of us in the mist. 208
We began the long journey back to the city. Gordon, Carl and Kevin kept themselves warm by sharing a bottle of whisky the Irishman in oilskin trousers had given them.
Bernie and I sat on our own a little farther forward. I pondered on what we had just experienced. I assumed the Irishman and his crew on the barge were smugglers—why else would they take a cargo of silver bowls and candelabras aboard in the middle of the night?
While I was thinking these thoughts, Bernie was falling asleep. His huge head nodded once or twice before finally falling forward, chin on chest. I wasn’t surprised. I know myself how exhausted real fear can make you.
A new day was dawning by the time the scrawny skipper brought us alongside the boatyard wharf where our trip had started. A few minutes later Bernie and I were sitting in the back of the lorry taking us back to Oswald Street. Once we were there, Bernie took me down to the cellar and unlocked the chain around my neck. Then, without saying a word, he left, locking the door behind him.
I was tired, but also elated. I’d been able to show them what I was capable of and now they’d surely recognize what a waste it was to keep me locked up when I could be working. 209It wouldn’t be long before they let me out of the cellar again and I would, of course, continue to be helpful, hard-working and obedient.
Until I saw an opportunity to escape!