Joe, it says, in large, friendly letters. Oil the slide and watch the safety, it’s loose. Love, Dad.
Here, in this room, is evidence of care from Mathew Spork for his one begotten son, a gesture of love and an appeal for absolution. Not just a memento or an escape kit. A Gangster’s Parachute. Just in case the straight life doesn’t work out.
Without hesitation, Joe strips the dummy and changes his clothes. The suit is a little loose around the shoulders, but other than that, it’s a good fit. His father’s guess at his full growth, and the tailor’s. Polly Cradle watches in silence as he puts on the hat.
He turns to the trombone case.
It isn’t a trombone case, of course. It looks a bit like one, but—Arthur Sullivan notwithstanding—no one in Joe’s situation actually believes their problems can be solved with a trombone. Unless he is greatly mistaken, the case contains something louder and less musical. It is also extremely illegal, but Joe is rather a long way past the point where he cares about that. He opens the case. The not-trombone is resting in pieces in black velvet compartments. Various tools and expendables are included in the kit, so that he can maintain and furnish his not-trombone at home. There’s even a score, telling you how to play music on it, and what ingredients are necessary for the creation of further vital supplies. And on the inside of the lid is the maker’s mark: the Auto-Ordnance Corporation of New York.
Papa Spork’s beloved Thompson sub-machine gun.
He realises, suddenly, how very long he has been waiting for this moment.
He grins, and carefully slots the pieces into place, then stands in the semi-dark. He lifts the tommy gun in across his chest, and smiles a smile of wide, boyish joy.
“‘At last, my hand is whole again,’” says Crazy Joe Spork.
XVI
Drinks at the Pablum Club;
Jorge, Arvin, and the Tricoteuses;
dangerous to mess around with.
The Pablum Club is not actually in St. James’s. It’s off to one side, and it isn’t nearly as ancient as the doorman’s spectacles would suggest. Founded as a place where gentlemen who retained fire in the gut could escape from the fossilised remnants at the Athenaeum and the O&C, it has all the external trappings, all the leather chairs and expensive brandies, but the patrons generally discuss their mistresses rather than their handicaps, and an iron rule of secrecy applies to all conversations great or small, on pain of disenfranchisement. If the modern establishment has a special fortress, a medal for long service at the old boys’ wheel, it is the Pablum.
The Hon Don is a major stakeholder, so Joe orders himself an obscenely ancient and expensive malt whisky and a Patrón Gold tequila (with actual gold in it) for Polly Cradle. Then he puts his two-tone brogues up on the mahogany coffee table and lets his head fall onto the backrest of his thronelike chair. After a moment, the fellows’ butler arrives to ask him not to and to inquire as to whether the lady would not prefer the Ladies’ Bar. Polly Cradle smiles and says she wouldn’t, and the fellows’ butler replies that he is almost sure she would, and Polly Cradle very gently tells him that really, she wouldn’t, whereupon the fellows’ butler appeals to Joe and Joe tells him to get the Hon Don toot suite, and shows him his gun.
The fellows’ butler runs like hell, but does not—because gentlemen with fire in the gut are prone to this sort of outburst—call the police. Polly Cradle lets Bastion out of his bag, and he selects a damasked sofa and, despite being small, occupies it entirely. Joe smiles a smile of malign anticipation, and waits.
Part of him—he’s coming to think of his hesitations as Old Joe—feels strongly that his presence here is premature. He should plan, he should husband his resources. He should, in fact, be sensible. To this injunction the inner gangster responds with a deep and flatulent raspberry. If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If it gives you compromising pictures of venal bankers with a wide and varied social acquaintance in the halls of power, then you blackmail while the sun shines.
“I need the Hon Don,” he’d told Polly Cradle on the way back to London, “and I need the Night Market. Whatever I’m doing, I’m going to need them. I can feel it.” She made love to him, as promised, between junctions fifteen and seven. He closes his eyes for a moment in heady recollection.
A notedly traditionalist bishop goes to sit on the damasked sofa, leaps up as the episcopal fundament is assailed by Bastion’s one remaining tooth, and then nearly expires of sheer horror at the pink marble eyes and the halitotic sneer.
The Hon Don arrives a moment later with their drinks.
“Hello, Hon Don!” Joe carols.
“Hello, Hésus, my old friend,” the Hon Don says loudly, and nods to the shaking bishop. “ ’Lo, Your Eminence, have you met Hésus, sounds like your sort of fellow, doesn’t he, with a name like that, but of course it’s very common in Spain, where he’s from.” This with a warning glance at Joe and Polly. “Yes, indeed, Count Hésus of Santa Mirabella—and I do believe I’ve not met the countess, you must be she, how charming, utterly,” and at this point he’s put down the drinks and is close enough to snarl “What the fuck are you doing here, you little shithead?” as he goes to embrace his guest.
Joe Spork smiles a beatific smile, and produces a colour photocopy of the incriminating Polaroid snaps. “I bring closure, Don. I bring joy to all mankind. My family’s estates may lie in ruins, but I have my father’s heritance. I know you’ll be relieved to hear it’s all intact and in a safe place. There was something he always wanted you to have, but death took him”—he smiles at the bishop, who has found a dog-less and uncomfortable-looking lounger in the corner, and waves—“I should say ‘the Lord God, merciful and mighty, took him off to his just reward,’ hello, Your Eminence, most pleased to make your acquaintance, I am Hésus de la Castillia di Manchego di Rioja di Santa Mirabella, and this is my lady wife, Poli-Amora, greetings from the Most August Court of Spain! Yes, greetings, to you and your family, may they have many children within wedlock and rock the vault of Heaven with their procreations!” But when he turns back to the Hon Don sotto voce there is suddenly an absolute cold in his face, a shadow of days and nights in the tiny room at Happy Acres, “So you’re all mine, you old goat, or your life will be miserable unto the last hour, you hear me? Because your first problem will be explaining what you were doing with two girls from the chorus at The Pink Parrot and that will be as nothing—as nothing—to the fuss which will kick off when they learn whose living room you were in and who dobbed you in, namely me, namely Britain’s most wanted, and they will dig through every aspect of your life and fuck it up as they have done mine, and they will find nothing about me (which will only make them more suspicious) and doubtless a few dozen things which you would prefer were not revealed, and after that, if I am not dead, I will come into your house like a cleansing flame and I will smite you as you have never been smote before, sing hallelujah!”
He flings his hands high into the air and smiles at the bishop, who nods genially back and hides behind the Financial Times. The Hon Don glowers.
“What do you want?”
“Addresses, Donald. Names and places. I wish to know of the lives and loves of a fat man and a thin one, mandarins from the shady bit of our glorious civil service. I shall also require the use of one of your more secluded—no, let’s stretch a point and say soundproofed—properties. I believe you have a couple on the edge of Hampstead Heath which would be ideal. We shall speak of it in camera. But have we established the principle?”