DUFFY SLEPT LATE AND got up slowly. His ear didn’t feel too good. He rescued some muesli that had been trying to escape from its triple straightjacket of polythene bags, and chewed his way through it without real enthusiasm. He never trusted muesli to be what it said it was. He couldn’t believe there weren’t jokers in the muesli factories who occasionally slung in a box of sawdust, or a bagful of wood-shavings, or a sack of hedge-clippings, just to see if anyone noticed the difference. They wouldn’t, of course. The worse it tasted, the better it was for you: that’s what everyone believed.
At ten o’clock he went to the telephone and dialled Carol. She came sleepily to answer it: she’d been on the old shit shift again, six till two in the morning. Yes, she’d love to come round that evening. Anything special? Were they going out? That was a joke, even though she never said it as one. They never went out. Or rather, to be more precise, he never took her out. What did you do last night, Carol? Oh, Duffy didn’t take me out again, that’s what we did. Her girlfriends smiled, because she looked a bit embarrassed. That Duffy, they thought, a real terror in the sack, we can tell. We know what she means by staying in.
But of course, it wasn’t like that. They stayed in, and Duffy cooked her dinner while she teased him about how he always scrubbed the vegetables clean enough for a moon shot; about how the food was trying to escape, and how the knife gave a better reflection than her make-up mirror. They pottered around each other like an old couple. And, contrary to what her girlfriends thought, they didn’t go to bed together – also like an old couple. They watched television, and chatted, and sometimes, but not necessarily, Carol would drop her watch in the Tupperware box and cuddle up to him for the night. She’d stopped expecting anything to happen. Well, it happened elsewhere; and it was surprising how, after a while of not expecting it, you really didn’t mind. You even gave up quietly trying to rub yourself against him. You suspected he didn’t like it anyway – brought back too many memories.
Next, Duffy called Willett and asked if he could drop by after work. He had a questionnaire in response to the one old Willett had given him the other day. There was a chuckle of assent. Then he rang a new number, one from his notebook.
‘Could I speak to Mr Dalby?’
‘I’m afraid Mr Dalby’s not available at the moment, sir.’ No: probably a bit early. All that late-night pounding up and down Dude’s, making sure the corks and the cocks are popping off regularly: it must take it out of a fellow.
‘When would be a good time to ring?’
‘Well, you could try about eleven.’
‘Fine.’ That would also make him nice and late for Mrs Boseley; help her pretend to work up a fine head of steam. At eleven o’clock he rang again.
‘Mr Dalby in?’
‘I’ll just see. Who’s calling?’
‘Oh, just say it’s Lord Brown’s assistant.’
‘Just a moment, sir … Putting you through.’ They always did, Duffy reflected.
‘Hallo, Dalby here.’ A precise voice, with neutral intonation, ready to switch to bossy or deferential as the occasion demanded.
‘Good morning, Mr Dalby, it’s Jeffrey Marcus here, Lord Brown’s assistant.’ Duffy could do a perfectly unstreet voice if he wanted to. ‘It’s a private matter, actually, not to do with Lord Brown.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been talking to Christopher, and he tells me you’re doing business again.’
‘Christopher …?’ Dalby sounded puzzled, as well he might.
‘I know him as Christopher, he’s used that to me for a couple of years, but I daresay he uses another one for you. No flies on Christopher.’
‘If you say not …’
‘So if you’re doing business again, I’d like to come and see you this evening.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘I don’t think that would be wise, do you? Not on this line …’
‘Oh, I suppose not … ’
‘Shall we say nine o’clock, Mr Dalby? And I’ll come to the front door, shall I?’ Duffy hoped he’d say, No, not the front door, and give him an alternative, but his confident, almost hectoring tone with Dalby had clearly worked too well.
‘Yes, nine o’clock, yes, all right, Mr Marcus, well I’ll expect you then.’
At least that had gone smoothly. Duffy regarded the success of the call as moral payment for the damage to his ear; that’s to say, the first, extremely small down-payment. As long as the rest of it went as smoothly. As long as he could continue to sweet-talk Dalby in person; as long as Willett came up with the right answers; as long as Mrs Boseley stuck to her agreement and didn’t have a frame-up and a copper waiting at the door for him when he turned up to work; as long as plan A – which involved tidiness, intelligence, acuteness and an enormous amount of luck – worked. And if it didn’t, he’d have to fall back on plan B, which involved being really rather nasty, cutting a few legal corners, and relying on only a fairly enormous amount of luck.
Duffy ticked off his rosary to himself as he drove slowly to work in the late morning; he felt it wouldn’t be good for the van today to exceed forty-five, and dawdled along the M4, tugged at occasionally by the slipstream of airport buses as they swooshed past. The rosary went: fresh flowers, joss-sticks, tinned lychees, pistachio nuts, fresh clams, miscellaneous. Dalby must own a restaurant somewhere as well. He ticked them off, turned them over in his mind, went through them again, forwards, then backwards. It would have to be ‘miscellaneous’. His morale sank a bit at the thought. But maybe Willett would tell him differently.
Looking back on the previous evening, Duffy shook his head at himself for the remark about all men having a slice of gay in them. Especially to someone like Gleeson, the inside of whose locker door was a papier mâché of Page Three girls several centimetres thick. And he’d kept his tongue under such good control up till then. It was the sort of remark you might toss at someone offensive you met at a party who was already quite sozzled and had a caliper on his leg, but not at a muscular page-fucker who had your pecker in his pocket, or at least your ear in his pincers. Dumb, Duffy, dumb.
But at the same time, behind the sensation of having half his head torn away there had been a thought struggling out, and the thought was quite simple. It went: Gotcha. Gotcha. That final impulse of Gleeson’s to pull Duffy’s head off may have been simple queer-bashing; but everything before and after was about something else. The fact that Duffy’s ear was at risk in the first place told him that it wasn’t just about who he was and where he had met Mr Hendrick. The violence came from nerves, from jumpiness, from a willingness if necessary to wipe out the whole freight shed if that’s what it took to get what they wanted; a willingness haunted by a fear that if they did, this might blow it all. Which was why – though Duffy’s tail was in any case fairly well covered – they wanted to believe him. They desperately wanted him to be no more than what he had confessed to being when he cracked.
And this jumpiness, coupled with their keenness to sack him on the spot, made Duffy convinced something was going to happen pretty soon; that some shipment or other was on its way. That’s why they had been so thrown when the new theft occurred and that’s why they wanted to believe Duffy’s rather thin, hopeful assurance that he’d fix Casey for them before the end of the week. They had no evidence on Casey, or even any knowledge of Duffy’s competence; but their worry made them believe they had both.
So Duffy wasn’t surprised when Mrs Boseley played her part as arranged. As he was stripping off his jeans top at his locker, Tan was suddenly beside him.
‘Missus Bosey see you now soon.’
‘Thanks, Tan, I’ll think it over.’
‘No, now, soon soon, she say.’
‘O.K. Tan, O.K.’ He stretched self-indulgently, putting on an act for Tan. ‘That woman gives me a real pain in the melon, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘ …? You cut yourself?’
‘Yeah, I cut myself. Ear today, gone tomorrow. Oh, forget it.’
Tan looked mystified, as well he might, by the different Duffy that had turned up today. This new man slouched across from the lockers to the raised office, pushed open the door and stood just inside it. Both he and Mrs Boseley kept their voices raised so that anyone hanging around could hear.
‘You wanted to see me?’
‘Yes. Sit down, Duffy.’
‘I’m happy here.’
‘You’re late.’
‘So?’
‘Don’t you so me, Duffy, I demand an explanation. Other men have had to do your work until you decided to show up.’
‘Well, that makes a change. Normally I get their shitty jobs to do all day. Now they’re doing their own for a change.’
‘If you’re not happy in your work you’d better find another job. I can’t say you’ll be missed here.’ They were shouting at each other quite loudly by now; out of the corner of his eye Duffy could see a baffled Casey, plus one of the drivers, looking up at them.
‘I wouldn’t mind it if there weren’t so many cunts around this place.’ That should be enough, he thought; however much they dislike Mrs Boseley, they’ll see that as a sackable offence.
‘You’re fired.’
‘It can’t be soon enough as far as I’m concerned.’
‘I want you out in a week. Now get back to your work.’
Duffy kicked at the glass door but found that it was wisely reinforced. As he clattered down the steps he shouted over his shoulder, ‘Needs a cowing union, this place.’
Though the bravado was fake, it still somehow infected Duffy. He was playing a game with Mrs Boseley, but he still enjoyed bawling her out in front of the shed. He sat in his dunce’s corner feeling quite chipper for most of the morning. And when the dinner whistle went a surprising thing happened. Casey lolloped across to him and punched him on the bicep.
‘Canteen,’ he said, clearly and loudly. Duffy felt like an animal experimenter who had finally taught one of his charges to imitate the sound of the human voice. The effort, however, took a lot out of Casey, and over his double spaghetti hoops and chips he slumped back into his normal taciturnity. When he threw his spoon down after his double plum duff and exhaled loudly, Duffy thought he might pick the conversation up.
‘What a day,’ he said. ‘Nearly slice me ear off shaving, and then get the boot.’
Casey frowned. He appeared to be thinking for a very long time. Then he said, in a tone of extreme confidentiality, ‘Like the way you call ’er cun’. Herher.’
Duffy felt almost moved. Casey was, he guessed, expressing a sort of affection for him. What a pity it had taken so long. What a pity they would only be lunching together for another week or so. What a pity Duffy might have to dump Casey in the shit.
After work he rolled along to Terminal One again, to the Apple Tree Buffet. The same air of mass panic reigned, as ever, only transferred to a new set of damp-palmed passengers.
‘A couple of factual points,’ he said to Willett, ‘and a quiz.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Factual point one. You find a bag of heroin. Doesn’t matter where, Chinaman’s bum or wherever. What happens?’
‘Well I guess we’d pull it out first.’
‘And then?’
‘We do a field test on it. We’ve got a little kit. Just to make sure it isn’t contraband salt or something they’re trying to smuggle in.’
‘And that tells you what it is.’
‘More or less, yes. Then we send it to the Government Chemist. Under seal, of course, so that the courier doesn’t get too merry. They analyse it for us and report back.’
‘And what can they tell?’
‘Well, they tell you what it is. They tell you how old it is. They tell you where it comes from. That’s one of the more satisfactory sides of it all: the analysis is incredibly precise. It’s helped, of course, by the fact that no two batches will ever be the same – unless they’re made at the same time in the same factory, of course. And as so much of it is cottage-industry work, well, that’s a help. I mean, you wouldn’t get two batches of heroin the same any more than you’d get a pair of salt-glaze plates coming out the same.’
Duffy didn’t need the comparison. For a start, he didn’t understand it.
‘And if … supposing, say, the courier had a bag – say there were two bags, and they got split up, on the plane or wherever, and they were found some distance apart: would the Chemist be able to prove that they were part of the same batch?’
‘Oh yes. No problem. It’s often the only evidence we’ve got that, say, a couple of dealers are connected. But it’s very strong evidence.’
‘Hmmm. Good. End of part one. Ready for the quiz?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are a smuggler.’ It seemed only tit for tat: Willett had made him play a customs officer. ‘You have a certain amount of heroin.’
‘What form?’
‘What do you mean, what form?’
‘Well, it’s not just powder necessarily. It can be dissolved into a solution, made into paste. Can I do what I like with it?’
‘You can do what you like with it. All you have to do is get it through customs – through me. I’m a keen but relatively new assistant officer.’
‘No problem.’
‘No, you have to do it in one of six ways. You’re freighting in six sorts of cargo, and it has to go in one – or perhaps more than one – of them. Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘O.K., here’s your starter for ten. Pistachio nuts.’
‘Are those those little green buggers?’
‘Yuh.’
‘Sort of half-open but you still break your fingernails on them? Some of them are open and you break your fingernails; some of them are closed and you break your teeth?’
‘Yuh.’
‘Shouldn’t be too difficult.’ Willett thought for a minute or so. ‘Powder form. Break out some of the half-open ones, fill the shell with stuff, glue the two halves shut.’
‘What, individually?’
‘Sure. You get enough in each to buy a car with. Once it’s cut for street selling. And they’re sort of dusted over with salt or something, aren’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll help. No trouble. We’ve got them through. Next?’
‘Joss-sticks.’
‘Hmmm. How do they come?’
‘Oh, not sure. Let’s say, packets of, what, twenty, thirty? Few dozen packets to the case.’
‘What sort of packet? Paper?’
‘Yeah, O.K. Well, cardboard box, say, and a paper label.’
‘That’s trickier. Couldn’t exactly drill the sticks. Making it into sticks and painting it? No. No – it’ll have to be the packaging. Not too difficult, but long and messy as the boxes aren’t that big, but O.K. Soak the labels off, make the heroin up into paste, and paste them back on. That should get through you.’
‘Tinned lychees.’
‘Tins. Can be good, can be bad. Depends entirely on the state of your ancillary technology. If you have a little canning factory on the side, of course, no problem. Three ways, I suppose. You could use the paste method on the label. Or you could use a draining method: that’s to say, you take off the label, bore a tiny hole in the can – no, I suppose you’d need two, wouldn’t you, one for the air – and pour off the liquid. Then you refill with dissolved heroin – just bung it in with a syringe. Stick the label back on and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘What about the lychees?’
‘Oh, you just leave them in. Unless, of course, heroin and lychees set up some sort of chemical reaction I don’t know about. But dissolved heroin’s very popular. You’ve no idea how many bottles of soya sauce and Chinese wine we’ve opened to no very good effect.’
‘And the third way?’
‘Well, what’s easiest for the man at the other end is if you can interfere at the canning stage – either that or have the technology to take out the can lid and then reweld it. Then you just dump the bag of heroin inside, fill up with a few lychees until you get exactly the same weight as all the other cans, and reseal it.’
‘How does the person at the other end recognise the can?’
‘No trouble. Simple code – say, a couple of tiny pinpricks in the label, in prearranged places. Unless we get tipped off – or unless we open every single can that comes through – there’s no possibility of our spotting it. And if we tried opening every can that came through whose label wasn’t in absolutely perfect nick – well, we’d have to have a whole separate department, wouldn’t we?’
‘Fresh flowers.’
‘What sort?’
‘Er – various.’
‘In that case – various possibilities. If they’re exotic, you know, big fleshy stems, you could work a thin plastic straw of stuff up the inside of the stalks. You could use the packaging in the same way as with the joss-sticks – paste form. You could – though this would depend on where they were coming from and how long they were taking – use cloth or maybe cotton wool soaked in heroin solution, to look as if they were keeping the flowers damp. It’s a bit of a long shot, but that sort of thing has been done. Oh, and there’s another clever thing with flowers I heard once. Not in this country, though. They got a local artist – must have been a very skilled fellow – to paint on to bits of paper what looked like the bottoms of the inside of flowers: you know, the sort with big bells to them. Then they stuck these inside and had what was in effect a false-bottomed flower; room for a fair amount of stuff between the two bottoms.’
‘Like a suitcase.’
‘Exactly. Bloody clever. You wouldn’t look there, would you?’
‘No. Fresh clams.’
‘I don’t really know what they look like; I’d have to have a gander at them first. If they’re closed up – or if some of them are – you can just use the pistachio nut principle. If they’re open: bit trickier, might have to use the shells in some way. Well, if that’s too hard I’d just go for the packaging.’
‘Uh-huh. And last of the six: Miscellaneous.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, that’s what it says on the documentation.’
‘Bits of everything?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, then it’s my birthday, isn’t it – looking at it one way. I mean, if you’ve got a case with a dozen different things in, I’ll find you a dozen different methods, and then I’ll pick the best, and you’d never find it, except of course that you might.’
‘Why might I?’
‘Because you’d look quite closely at something coming through called Miscellaneous. It seems a bit too likely, given that you’ve got any suspicions at all. It’s just the method some not-too-professional guy might use for a big one-off shipment.’
‘Uh-huh. So which of the six would you use?’
‘Well, don’t forget I might well come up with better methods for each of them, given a bit of time. I mean, that’s what it’s all about. Those guys out there spend months, sometimes years, thinking up something which we either spot or don’t spot in seconds or minutes. It’s not very good odds. And they’re always changing. As soon as any method is busted – and often, if they’re smart, before – they move on; the clever guys never use the same system once it’s been blown, wherever in the world.’
‘So which would you use?’
‘I don’t like the clams, though I’d have to have another think about them. I don’t like the joss-sticks because that might make some keen young assistant officer start thinking of opium dens or whatever. As I said, I don’t like Miscellaneous. I’d go for the nuts, the tins, or the flowers. At that stage it depends on your personality as much as anything. Flowers if I were a bit more fanciful than I am; tins if I had the technology; nuts if I had the patience. But don’t misunderstand me – I’d get past you. I’d get past you, anyway.’
Duffy pondered. Was that a quiet appeal? A don’t-do-anything-on-your-own-lad bit of advice? Possibly. If you were Willett, you wouldn’t enjoy the thought of amateurs trying to play customs men; you’d expect a tip-off, an appeal to the professionals. Fair enough – except that Duffy had no details: no shipment time, no specific goods to watch, just a hypothesis. Officer, open that hypothesis at once. Just as I thought: a false bottom.
He decided to half-respond to Willett’s appeal.
‘If I got on to anything … ’
‘Yes?’
‘How far does your authority run?’
‘Everywhere.’
‘You mean, outside the bonded area? As far as Hendrick Freight?’
‘No, I mean everywhere. You don’t get an amnesty just because you’ve got something through the customs. If goods are prohibited or dutiable they stay that way. We’ll come looking you up wherever you are.’
‘Ah. Well, in that case I don’t think I’ll try. I’ll dump my stuff overboard from the cross-Channel ferry.’
Willett’s creased face crinkled up a little more.
‘Well, watch the currents is my advice.’
‘ …?’
‘Case a few years ago. Some fellow in a private aircraft got cold feet. Flying in with a nice bale of stuff that wasn’t exactly feed for his cattle. Hay content pretty low, as you might say. Anyway, got cold feet, dumped all the stuff in the Channel. Landed, went home, felt a lot poorer but a lot more relieved. Few days went by, and the tide washes up this great bundle of dope on the Dorset coast. Somebody’s birthday, the old farmer thinks, and smokes a fair bit of it before he realises it’s that funny stuff they’re always going on about in the papers. Calls us in, we trace it, and do the pilot for illegally importing it.’
That seemed a bit thick to Duffy. He grunted, and went on.
‘This is factual point number two, by the way. If I got on to anything, I could give you a call?’
‘You’d be mad not to.’ Willett was proud of his profession, proud of the way Heathrow had moved in recent years. It had got a lot tighter. Of course, this meant that the clever guys were trying elsewhere – Luton, for instance, and soft, package-tour airports where bandits swirl through the green channel in a bustle of tired perms and duty-free Tia Maria. But even so, that was grounds for local pride.
‘I could be … quite general, could I?’
‘Oh yes – often we just get tips along the lines of: Jamaica, sometime this month. But it gives us more of a chance.’
‘Or if … I was very specific?’ Duffy, as always, was keen to cover his tail.
‘Second locker along, top shelf. We wouldn’t object to that, mate.’
‘And what about my position if I rang you – or someone else if you’re not on duty?’
‘Well, if I’m not around, ask for Dickie Mallett: first-rate chap. As for you: I couldn’t be absolutely positive, I’m not a lawyer. But I’d say that you’d have at least as much immunity as was necessary for us to make sure we’d get the information.’
That sounded nice and legal: in other words, muddled and incomprehensible. Duffy tried again.
‘If I rang you up, and didn’t say who I was, just said, “I’m an interested member of the public” – say I said exactly that, but you knew I was me, and then I tipped you off. Would you have to pass on that you knew it was me?’
Willett realised that this wasn’t part of the quiz (not that the quiz hadn’t been for real, he reflected); he was being tested. He gave it a few moments’ thought.
‘I think I’d think,’ he replied eventually, ‘that if you used that formula, you’d be stating your terms, and I’d have to accept them. I’d also argue, for form’s sake, that if I didn’t guard your identity the first time round, then there wouldn’t be any hope of there being a second time round.’
Duffy smiled. He didn’t think there was much chance of a second time – he didn’t much want to work around airports again. But he’d got his deal.
He’d got his deal, but Willett had also blown Plan A for him. Well, it had been naïve of him in the first place to expect that his friend would just reply, No, No, No, No, No and then Yes, it’ll be in the third clam on the right in the next delivery but one. That was stupid; but he’d gone along with half-believing it because he wasn’t too keen on Plan B. Then he touched the bit of his left ear that was allowed to protrude from the houseman’s tender swaddling, and he got a bit less unkeen on Plan B.
Christ, he’d double-booked Carol. Should he call her, or pretend that the Dalby business had cropped up subsequently? Well, in a way it had, he supposed. Think about it later, he said to himself. There are a couple of calls to be made first, and a couple of connections. One of which meant very bad news for somebody.
As he dialled Geoff Bell’s number, he worked at his opening gag. Bell was a friend whom Duffy used occasionally for help on the technical side of things. He could bug a phone merely by scowling at it; he could photograph through brick walls. Duffy had once foolishly bet him a fiver that he couldn’t get a photo of him, Duffy, in his underpants, within a week. Duffy went around for two days being extremely careful where he dropped his trousers. He needn’t have bothered. On the third day in the post he got a blurred, grainy but unambiguous snap of himself and a friend from the Alligator. In a very post-underpants condition. Bell’s covering note read: ‘I’ll keep trying for one with the underpants if you like.’ As there were four days to go on the bet, Duffy didn’t rate his chances and paid up.
Bell recorded every incoming telephone call, so Duffy always began his in satirical vein:
‘Ah, Geoff,’ he said when he got through, ‘this is AQ35B about the Tripoli connection. If we put the plastic under the second oil-well rather than the third, then we could use the lighter detonators and run the fuse straight across the Med to Malta.’
‘Duffy, how are you? Haven’t heard from you for ages. Not since that wipe-job you gave me.’ Sometimes Duffy despaired of Bell. What was an introductory game to Duffy was an entirely serious test to Bell.
‘Got something rather tricky coming up, Geoff, wondered if you could help.’
Duffy had something rather simple coming up, as a matter of fact; it was just that Bell didn’t get excited by simple jobs.
‘Are you free tomorrow night?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to need a body-recorder sometime around six, and then a bit later, not sure when, I’m going to need three copies done and taken to three different addresses as quickly as possible. I’ll probably be dodging bullets at the time,’ he added melodramatically.
‘Well don’t use a police vest, you can shoot Rice Krispies through them. If you’ve got the right weapon, of course. Like a pea-shooter.’
‘What about the taping?’ Trust Geoff to seize the inessential first.
‘Well, we’ll do it in series, so that you get the same quality on each instead of a slightly deteriorating one, and … ’ Geoff went on for some time, but Duffy didn’t listen: Bell was talking to himself really.
The second call he made was to Christine, a nurse he’d met a few months ago. Physically, she overlapped with Carol a bit too much for Duffy to feel it was O.K. to fancy her; so he just took her out a few times, now and then, feeling a bit bad towards Carol when he did so. She, in turn, was quite pleased that Duffy wasn’t a doctor, and that gynaecological examination wasn’t going to be called for before the first half can of beer had been downed, the first packet of crisps finished. Duffy never asked for that. Indeed, this time, on the phone, it was the first time he’d asked for anything. He said he needed what he needed for some amateur dramatics; well, actually, for a comic sketch he was doing with some friends at a pub. Could she come? No, he’d be embarrassed in front of her, he’d freeze; but if he did it again, sure she could come. Could she borrow one for him? Christine said it was strictly against hospital regulations; but they were always throwing them away, and if it wasn’t for use … No, said Duffy, but it must look as if it could be used – there might be some doctors in the audience who’d complain if it didn’t have the right end on it. And he could pick it up tomorrow? Lovely.
At 7.30 Carol arrived in her Mini.
‘What’s it to be tonight, Duffy? Cheese on toast, or grilled bread with a cheese topping? Christ, what have you done to your ear?’
‘Shaving. It’s all right, doesn’t hurt. I’m having moussaka and chips, and you can have whatever’s on the menu under four quid.’
‘Duffy … ’ and there was a curve of surprise and delight in her tone as she drew out the name, ‘we’re not going out, are we?’
‘All right.’
‘You should have told me, I’d have changed.’
Duffy looked embarrassed. Carol thought this was because he felt guilty about how long it had been since he’d last taken her out. But he went on looking embarrassed.
‘Duffy,’ she said sternly, ‘what’s the catch?’
‘Nnn?’
‘What’s the catch, Duffy?’
‘Eh? No catch.’ But she could tell there was. ‘I’ve got to see a man on the way, that’s all.’
‘Duffy, you are a bugger.’ He gave her a wary grin.
‘I know.’
At 8.30 they left and drove slowly into town. When Carol saw the direction in which they were going, she turned to him and said, ‘You’re not taking me to work, are you, Duffy? I mean, I don’t need to clock in till tomorrow morning.’ That made him look even more embarrassed.
They drove much closer to Dude’s this time, and parked about thirty yards short of it.
‘That’s where I’m going,’ he said, pointing down the street. ‘Shan’t be long.’
‘You are a dirty bugger, Duffy. If I see one of my mates tootling past, I’ll send them in just to see you aren’t up to any monkey business.’ But she didn’t really mean it. If Duffy wanted to spend his money in posh massage parlours, then that was up to him. She couldn’t disapprove. And at least it was with women.
There was a different hat-check girl tonight. Blonde, and with breasts … no, Duffy didn’t really want to look at them. There was something about this place that made you feel a lot dirtier, and at the same time a lot less interested. Fifteen pairs of breasts ought to be fifteen times more exciting than one pair; but it didn’t work like that. Even in the booth with the girl he hadn’t really felt much interest in her breasts, because they didn’t seem to be hers: they seemed to be part of the club’s fixtures and fittings. Clipped on, and then put back on the shelf at two in the morning when the last puffing punter was given his hat and eased out into the street.
‘Do you charge?’ he said to the girl, suddenly curious.
‘Twenty pounds, sir … ’
‘No – no, I mean for leaving your hat.’
‘Your hat? Not many gentlemen have them nowadays,’ she said.
‘Or your coat. Does the cloakroom charge, is all I’m saying.’
‘Oh no sir, certainly not.’ She seemed quite offended. ‘Though of course, you can always tip us,’ she added. Of course. Always. The pound change from the price of a single whisky – that would be about right. He felt irritated.
‘Appointment with Mr Dalby,’ he said, rather curtly.
‘Oh, well, sir, I’ll have to see if he’s free.’
‘The name’s Marcus.’
‘Marcus what?’
‘Mister Marcus.’ Duffy realised he had picked himself a pseudonym made out of two Christian names. Like Eric Leonard. A name that wasn’t serious.
‘Oh, of course.’ The girl seemed abashed. Duffy felt like a bully. That was probably just as well; he had to get into the right mood for bluffing Dalby.
He rather hoped he wouldn’t be recognised by the girl with the northern accent and the breasts which were located in the middle of the graph. Still, how long did a punter stay in their minds – ten minutes? And besides, he looked different now; instead of Fifties revival and tincture of mothballs, he was all velved up. Blue jacket, blue trousers – a close enough match in this light to pass for a suit – boots, and a mauve shirt open at the neck. Did he look like Lord Brown’s assistant? Did he look like a dealer? Well, it was up to him to turn those equations round: he didn’t have to look like either of them if he made both of them look like him.
He gave a hooded glance at the girl-strewn bar as he was led towards the stairs. The same smell of joss-sticks. Just as dark downstairs. The booths with their slatted half-doors; the hands clamped to the breasts as if with superglue; the wet bottles; the fresh flowers; the artificial tones of hostess conversation; the balding husbands with good suits and bad consciences.
‘Mr Marcus, a pleasure.’ Dalby had come out of his office to greet him, and paused briefly to inspect the scene below. You couldn’t actually hear the peeling-off of ten pound notes; but you could imagine it well enough from here, Duffy thought.
At first Dalby’s office seemed floodlit, but it was only the contrast. Duffy sat in a high-backed tapestry-work chair across the desk from the club owner. He took his time, and looked around the office for a few seconds as if he were thinking of buying it. He took in the standard lamp, the sofa, the small bookcase, the series of large prints round the walls. They looked like early woodcuts which, for modern reproduction, had been enlarged about twenty times; they showed pastoral scenes. The one behind Dalby’s head depicted a large tethered horse, a cow, a sheep, and a couple of thatched cottages. Centuries, and worlds away from Dude’s. Unless, of course, the tethered horse belonged to Ye Olde Opium Dealer who had called in at one of the cottages to make a connection.
Dalby coughed, and Duffy permitted his eye to return slowly to the cougher. Dalby was watching him rather damply from behind his little round gold spectacles. Duffy decided that he momentarily had the initiative; and this was the way it was going to stay. If you bluff, bluff big, he thought, and bluff aggressive. Also, as a sign of confidence, leave out the shifty, ambiguous half-language of the trade. Dalby looked the sort of dealer who lived by circumlocution and might fret at straight talk.
‘The room’s clean,’ said Duffy sharply, in his unstreet voice. It was an affirmation rather than a question.
‘Oh yes.’
Duffy looked across at the open door past Dalby’s left shoulder, which led, presumably, to his bedroom, and the bathroom with the post-coital tub. He let his held glance act as his second question.
‘We’re quite alone,’ Dalby assured him.
Duffy then talked quickly and confidently, as befitted Lord Brown’s assistant.
‘I’ve got two hundredweight of grass coming in fairly soon, though from what I hear of you you won’t be very interested in that. Can’t say I blame you, it’s such a long-winded drug, isn’t it; and personally I find cigarettes a disgusting habit, though I cast no aspersions. I’ve got a moderate amount of coke coming in next week or so. And I’ve just had some excellent Chinese Number Three which is being cut at the moment. That’s my shopping list. Why you? Because I need money now for my next import, which is quite substantial. I wouldn’t go outside otherwise. I hear you’re reliable and honest – that’s what I hear, anyway – and if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re British, which makes a nice change. Of course, if you aren’t – I don’t mean British, I mean the other things – I don’t advise you to deal with me.’
Duffy gazed at Dalby impassively while awaiting his reply.
‘Er … um … um … ’ He seemed thrown by such directness. Thrown enough, Duffy hoped, not to go into the question of who the invented ‘Christopher’ might be.
‘ … er … price?’ he said eventually, as if forcing himself to use a dirty word.
‘The coke or the smack?’
‘The er … former.’ (Which meant that he was interested only in the former; or that he had his own supplies of the latter on the way?)
‘Sliding scale, depends on purity. I’ll have to wait and see when it arrives. My rates are middle-of-the-market. Twenty to thirty a gram. You want some?’
‘Er … yeees.’
‘Good, fine,’ said Duffy, as if he had another few calls to make that evening. He got up and extended his palm.
‘It’s all on the handshake,’ he said. Dalby took it as if it were an honour. ‘Oh, by the way, I seemed to disturb some of your customers on the way in. Is there another way out?’
‘Oh yes, this way.’ He took Duffy out of the office, along a corridor away from the booths, down a passage and out through a back door. No alarm system, simple door: Duffy was laughing. Dalby held the door open; Duffy nodded, but without looking at him, and strode out into the dark. That had been a strain.
‘Did they do wonderful things to you?’ Carol asked as he slid into the van. It was a half-serious tease. It was also near a dangerous subject.
‘Wonderful,’ replied Duffy in a dreamy voice. ‘Only costs fifty-four pounds.’
‘Will you take me some time?’ she asked. But Duffy only chuckled to himself.
Later, as they sat over kebabs and tried to make themselves heard above the Zorba music, he said, ‘I might let you go on your own.’
‘Where?’
‘That place – Dude’s.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I was just wondering who you might be having dinner with tonight.’ Carol looked puzzled. Duffy winked.
‘I’ll pay, of course, but if you take the bill, then you can charge it, can’t you, if it works out?’
She leaned over and tapped her knuckles on the top of his head, as if to restore order in there.
‘I mean, it’s a way of repaying you really, isn’t it?’
Sometimes, she didn’t understand him at all, even when she looked back on it later.
‘Your kebab’s getting cold.’ Why was he smiling at her like that?
He drove her back to Acton, since her car was there already, and as it was late she decided to stay the night. They went into the flat and Duffy turned all the lights on, even though they were going straight to bed. He always liked to have a last look round. It made him feel more secure about going to sleep.
‘Duffy,’ she said to him as she cuddled into his back.
‘Mnnn.’ He was almost asleep.
‘I like that velvet suit.’
‘Mnnn.’
‘Pity it doesn’t match.’