‘That’s probably true.’ I heaped things onto my own plate. ‘Are you in on the big job as well?’
‘We all are.’
‘I’ll feel safe.’
‘It’s very nice of you to say so.’
Oh no it wasn’t. The Boss could hardly get all of us wiped out. ‘Is Lord Moggerhanger coming?’
‘He’ll be staying in the control tower,’ he whispered.
I bumped into Pindarry, who avoided a flop of mayonnaise onto his electric blue suit. It went onto the carpet. Moggerhanger, talking to Polly, saw it. He saw everything. Pindarry saw him seeing it, so took a napkin from the snap-table and mopped up the mess. It was more than his bonus was worth not to. It was part of Moggerhanger’s nature to see everything, but it was also a talent he cultivated. He had read, or he had been told by Dr Anderson (for a fee or a crate of whisky), that great men notice everything. They had an omnivorous grasp of detail. True, yet not true. Child of the Bedfordshire parish, Moggerhanger had been born with keen eye and windmill touch. He’d abandoned school at fourteen, Blaskin told me (who had jollied Drudge-Perkins into doing some detective work), though he had not been attracted to it from birth, considering that as long as he learned the three ‘R’s’ any other knowledge he needed was accessible to someone of his intelligence, curiosity and greed. But just as it is true that great men owe their success to a grasp of detail, so it is equally true that their downfall is caused by an inability to delegate tasks whose success is vital to their continuing prosperity. Those who fall into this trap are not great men at all, Blaskin remarked, adding that Moggerhanger was just a nosy old bastard who couldn’t keep his hands to himself at a time when there were more blind eyes in the country than missing arms. I walked over to Matthew Coppice by the door. ‘How are things at Spleen Manor?’
He spoke so that no one but me would hear. ‘Alport’s gone east.’
‘I nearly went west,’ I laughed, ‘in Canada.’
‘The finest dope comes from the poppy lands of Turkestan,’ he said. ‘Farmers grow it in secret on collective farms. Some say the Russian government knows, but doesn’t mind. They’ll do anything to get foreign currency. The stuff’s delivered to Alport in East Berlin by a Russian general. I heard you-know-who saying that next time we’ll pay them with a few sacks of grain, which they seem to need more than money. You’d be surprised how much white stuff comes from Russia. Somebody sells a lot to them, and they sell most of it to us. Then (and I don’t know how this is done, but it is) we sell it back to them for furs, diamonds and ikons. Breezeblock Villa at Back Enderby is bursting at the seams. So are one or two police stations. We send it to Russia on ships to Odessa and Rostov. It goes on barges up the Dnieper and the Don — then on to the Volga-Don Canal and up to the Moscow-Vladivostok railway. Russian Sailors can’t get enough of it.’
I didn’t want to know so much, verbally, but couldn’t resist asking: ‘Why don’t they bring it from Moscow by plane, and save all this hole-and-corner trouble?’
‘Aeroflop’s too unreliable. You never know when the Russians are going to invade another country, like Afghanistan. They needed half their civilian air fleet to ferry in troops and guns. Lord M had a man carrying a valuable suitcase by Aeroflop to Australia. In Moscow there were no more planes, so they sent everybody back to Warsaw. The Poles didn’t know what to do with them, so they sent them back to London. Lord M’s courier had to book another route, and got there too late. The Green Toe Gang operating out of Amoy via Hong Kong made it first. Money was lost on that deal.’
‘Anything else?’ I was sweating because Cottapilly and Pindarry weren’t far away.
‘As long as it don’t snow,’ Matthew said loudly, in his simpleton fashion.
I laughed, as if at the end of a long joke.
‘I’m writing it down,’ he said. ‘A packet of papers will be waiting at Upper Mayhem, like you told me. It’s dynamite. We can’t lose.’
Only our ears, I thought, and a few fingers. The Arabs aren’t the only ones who chop your hands off for stealing. I slapped him on the back, then rejoined the crowd. ‘There are lots of new gangs coming up these days,’ Jericho Jim was saying.
‘Kid’s stuff,’ Kenny Dukes said. ‘Think of their names. Looting Tigers. Molotov’s Angels. The Window Smashers. Flames of God. Fucking riff-raff.’
‘Footpads and pickpockets.’ Cottapilly was also scornful. ‘Gaol meat.’
‘What’s wrong with pickpockets?’ Jericho Jim tapped me on the shoulder, and held my wallet in his hand. ‘You should watch this.’
I grabbed him by the jacket, my fist lifted. ‘You fuckpig.’
Moggerhanger smacked himself at the waistcoat with laughter. ‘It was only a joke among the lads, Michael. I bet him a pony he couldn’t get it off you.’
He turned white, so I let him go. ‘Next time, I’ll beat the living shit out of you.’
‘No harm done,’ the boss said. ‘You aren’t a proper Londoner if you haven’t had your pocket picked. Good job it wasn’t on the street. You’d never have seen it again.’
Jericho Jim straightened his tie. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. ‘Sorry about that.’
He grinned. ‘Sorlright. I learned it in Borstal, but I never had to earn my living at it, thank God.’
Lanthorn lit another of Moggerhanger’s cigars. ‘Those rioters and burners can expect little sympathy from me, Claud. What are they looting? Televisions, washing machines, videos, fags and booze. They should bring the army in and shoot the buggers like dogs. If they were taking bread and groceries I could understand it. My lads ’ud still go for ’em, though.’
Scottish George hated such talk. ‘The social fabric’s coming to pieces. Only communism can put things right.’
Moggerhanger liked a party. He was having a good time. ‘I don’t think so, Jack. Communism’s nothing but a middle-class plot to cure wild-cat strikes. Your free-born Englishman wouldn’t stand for it, God bless him!’
‘Well, I’m a Scot, sir.’ I liked George because he wouldn’t be intimidated. ‘It’s the only hope for the poor.’
‘Maybe so,’ Mog said. ‘But look at how my only begotten son is pushing that delicious food around his plate as if it was yak shit.’
‘Bollocks,’ Parkhurst drawled.
‘I wish you wouldn’t swear.’ Lady Moggerhanger and Polly came over from the drinks table.
‘You don’t know you’re born,’ Moggerhanger said to his no-good son. Then he addressed us all. ‘You’re stinking rich, that’s why. You should have been alive before the war, and put up with what we had to put up with. I expect some of you remember. My mother and father were turned out of their cottage one autumn, and the five of us lived through the winter in a tent. And winters were winters in those days! When we got a house the following year my younger brother died. I made up my mind I’d never put up with that again. And I didn’t, eh, Jack?’
Lanthorn nodded, and pulled on his cigar. ‘You were right. Some things are more than flesh and blood can stand.’
‘My mother’s eighty-five,’ Claud said, ‘and has a beautiful home in Golders Green. Somebody’s there all the time to wait on her hand and foot. She has enough money settled on her never to want, even if she lives to be a hundred.’
‘She’ll live longer than that if I know her,’ said his wife.
‘Maybe she will.’ I’d never seen him closer to tears — though he still had a fair way to go. I’d tell Blaskin that he had the human touch after all. He rubbed his hands together: ‘It’s no use wanting the impossible. Duty calls. It’s time we got down to work. And that means YOU,’ he roared at Parkhurst, who opened the door to slive out.
‘I’m going for a slash,’ he said. ‘And besides, I’ve heard your stories fifty times already. And for another thing, don’t expect me to work. I tried it once, and I didn’t like it.’