Girls

by Bill James

  At just after 2 a.m., on one of his usual closing-time inspection rounds, it really troubled him to find this much-shot male – no question, male – this much-shot, dead male near the emergency exit door in the club’s car park. It not only troubled him. It brought that tumble into dejection and near-despair and made Ember ask himself whether his ambitions for the club were on track. Occasionally, he did almost fold beneath such doubts. Although the Garrick, Athenaeum and Boodle’s might provide private car parks, Ember would give big odds that nobody from any of those clubs – management or membership – had come across a naked, dead pimp there lately: naked or even properly clothed, most probably.

  Of course, Ember knew him instantly, despite the absence of Adrian Cologne’s customary, vivid, stupidly expensive, loutish clothes, and regardless of the deep damage to his head and face. A club security light shone over the emergency door and gave the body some gleam. Ember considered himself very strong on security and safety – the security and safety of anyone at or around the club, plus his own. Adrian Cologne’s security and safety were beyond Ember’s care now. But he didn’t feel he had failed in his responsibilities because he suspected that Cologne had almost definitely been killed elsewhere, probably shot a few more times from close range after death, stripped, then brought here and left. This would be out of venom, tactics or playfulness.

  Despite his concerns for security, Ember could not risk closed circuit television at the Monty, so there’d be no film of Adrian’s arrival. It would have anguished some members to know their movements into, and particularly out of, the club had been filmed and timed and dated. They’d regard that as surveillance: this kind of record might provide prosecution evidence or blackmail material. Ember had read about Nixon and those fucking crazy, suicidal White House tapes in the 1970s.

  And Ember himself did not want that kind of burdensome, unhelpfully exact data, in case police approached him, say to crack an alibi of some member or members. Ember needed to stay non-involved. He considered discretion an essential habit in a club proprietor, and especially a club proprietor of a club like the Monty, as it currently was, whatever the future. Ember would like to kick out for ever many of his present members – probably nearly all – but while they remained on his books he must give them strong loyalty, which might include silence about their times of arrival and/or departure at/from the Monty. Of course, he realized that he might finish up like Adrian in the car park if he, Ember, did not give loyalty and silence, when relevant, which might be often. The nicely collaged shield could look after him in only one spot, and even there someone really skilled and set on doing him – maybe contracted – would probably be able to shoot around it.

  This thought had come to him, of course, the night Adrian Cologne turned up at the Monty to suggest a kind of partnership with Ralph. Well, no chance of that now. When Ember looked back to this meeting, he realized how sensitive and respectful Cologne had been: he would not presume to enter the Monty for a business discussion with Ember, because he must have known how Ralph usually forbade any talk of that sort in the club. It had been up to Ember to ignore his own rule and take Cologne to the bar. There was something grimly circular now about this earlier encounter in the Monty yard and tonight this one.

  Ember longed to wipe out for ever the very possibility of this kind of dark pattern. That would be accomplished by lifting the Monty towards a more glittering nature modelled on the Athenaeum’s. That was the club he really admired – full of considerable industrialists, scholars and administrators. As well as Burns Night, other meetings at the Athenaeum were often reported in the big London newspapers, naming the guest speaker and the important topic discussed, usually politics or economics, especially the Third World and Scotland. Ember aimed to get the Monty similar coverage to the Athenaeum’s one day. Because eminent people arranged appearances a long way ahead he’d already prepared a list of celebrities he’d invite to give talks: Clinton, obviously; a Nobel prizewinner, such as the poet Seamus Heaney; Nelson Mandela; Brad Pitt. Yes, Ember found it was the Athenaeum above all he wanted as model for the new Monty. The Garrick might be all right, but bohemian, and you never knew where that could end up. And he considered the name Boodle’s sort of deliberately unserious, oafish, with flippant rhymes, like doodle, noodle and caboodle. He wondered whether he would actually rename the club, ‘The New Monty’, taking a lead from ‘New Labour’.

  Pondering this body, Ember could see very well why Cologne might have been taken out. Given his line, all sorts of people would want to target him. Some of his girls could have parents who objected fiercely to the work he expected from their daughters. Well, most parents would, if they knew about it, unless on the game themselves, which could happen, in a dynastic way. Or there were those pimps from abroad who might see Adrian Cologne as stealing their method of work – girls as well as the commodities – and decide to finish him, as someone, or more than one, had finished Tirana. Wars inter-firm would persist, unless a proper understanding with, say, ACC Iles could be achieved. Adrian Cologne’s foul, pricey garments and slabs of jewellery would cause very rough envy among immigrant pimps. He wore those farcical cravats but to some these might have appeared ducal or Left Bank. Without a cravat, or anything else, now he looked fairly ordinary, except for the injuries.

  Almost always when the club shut, Ember did this good, final, all-clear tour himself. That job he would not delegate and often he’d be there after all the staff left. Ember had enemies. Naturally he had enemies. Anybody who made £600,000 a year from drugs wholesaling, plus Monty profits, must stir jealousy, just as in his minor, decorative, sleazy way, Adrian Cologne did. Although Ember wore very conventional, subdued, though fine, made-to-measure suits bought in London, and absolutely no jewellery beyond a fairly ordinary watch, he realized he could not avoid being noticed. The £600,000 might be too damn easy for others to estimate. Some said more. Some said a Big One, a million. Not so, but the idea circulated and ideas could be dangerous. And then the Monty takings in addition. Because of such factors, Ember knew he stood out, with the Heston resemblance additional and liable to rile some.

  Ember accepted the risks that came with wealth and systematically did what he could to guard against them, meaning more than just the shield: on his early morning rounds he always looked for incendiary stuff, or people lurking before a break-in, or a booby bomb under his car. Dumping a controversial, abused body on Ralph’s territory could be another way of getting at him. Perhaps some rival in the commerce hoped Ember would be tried for the murder, jailed, and in that way pulled out of the substances scene for a decade or so. After all, one of Ember’s decades equalled £6 million at the current state of earnings. Ember felt life and trade grew more and more competitive, and were laced with menace, such as shot Adrian, on bollock-naked, small-hours show like this, not far from where properly licensed and insured cars had stood, many this year’s top-of-the-range, including four wheel drive jobs.

  It puzzled him that Adrian should have been placed so near the security light, as if meant to be found. Others leaving the club might have seen him, might in fact have seen him delivered there, but few of the Monty’s present members would report this sort of thing to Ember or the law, for fear of getting dragged in. They would notice, as Ember did, the nearness to the light and deduce they were intended to have a stare and then pass the word. So, a trap? So, obviously – very fucking obviously – don’t fall for it. So, no mention.

  Besides, many Monty members had no regard for pusher-pimps – Cologne or any other. Some said pimps hurt the Monty’s image, and Ember had to agree with this, though he considered the image very unsatisfactory, anyway, at present, pimps or not. People would feel unanxious about leaving Adrian’s corpse on the ground in a car park or anywhere else.

  This death perhaps indicated all kinds of shifts in the local commercial scene and made Ember worry that, unless he began transforming the club upwards socially very soon, he might have some of these recently arrived Albanian pimps
as well as Brit new wave people applying for Monty membership. Although Ember would never regard himself as at all a Little Englander or racist, he foresaw difficulty if such Alb applications came in. Yes, pimps were looked down on, and foreign pimps would probably be exceptionally unwelcome. The Membership Committee might reject them and this could cause resentment, leading to more brutalities.

  Another factor. Another fucking vital factor: any corpse on Monty ground would have been a pain to Ember, but in an important way Cologne rated as special, special even among pimps. One of the girls who possibly worked to him now was the black kid called Honorée and mentioned that evening up at Morton Cross by Eva, Delphine, Rita.

  The main point about Honorée – and this main point could not be more damn main – the main point was that for quite a time now she ran a business liaison with Assistant Chief Constable (Operations), Desmond Iles. This had become pretty well known. Some said the relationship amounted to an affair, although, naturally, Honorée saw many other clients as well as Iles. The ACC could be an out-and-out hun, of course, but there was also something democratic about him. A tale that went around not long ago said she gave the Assistant Chief crabs. He stayed with her just the same. To Ember it seemed notable that when Iles was at some official occasion, possibly chatting sweetly and shaking hands with the Lord Lieutenant, the Pope or even the Queen, these busy travelling lice might be getting themselves dug in and comfy under his superior blue uniform trousers. Ember wondered if there could be some sort of parable in this, on whited sepulchre lines.

  What perturbed him, though, was the rumour that Honorée now worked for Adrian, and that he had turned savage with her lately, and so invited retaliation, revenge, wipe-out by one of her admirer regulars: i.e. Iles. Pimps often grew savage. A girl might offend somehow. It would be either skimming from customer payments; or refusing certain customers on account of gut, breath, grime, disease or age; or not getting enough customers; or drawing the line at some perv extras. It had to be likely that these days Honorée would turn down approaches she didn’t fancy. When you were dealing regularly with an Assistant Chief (Operations), sometimes, apparently, in a hire car on waste ground in the Valencia Esplanade district – well, when a girl had that kind of polished client, she might grow picky.

  This could be serious, if, for instance, she declined a friend or friends of Adrian, or distinguished villains he lined up for her, ready to pay big from heavy loot wads. For that kind of hoity-toityness a whore could get ferociously knocked about. Girls were generally beaten with a broomstick on the soles of their feet by the pimp, so as not to disfigure them and reduce drawing power. The girl would be held down on a table by an apprentice pimp, or tied down, with her feet over the edge. The soles of the feet were uncrucial body areas for tarts. They did not have to walk much, just stood and waited and talked bill-of-fare, then generally went in cars.

  As he stood near Cologne, Ember naturally felt the Panicking Ralph, or even Panicking Ralphy, symptoms trying to capture him. Adrian dead with bullet wounds on Monty soil, plus – oh, God, yes, plus – his possible link to Iles via Honorée, brought bad stress, and as soon as he recognized Cologne, Ember had felt that well-known rectangle of fright-sweat take up station across his shoulders. Also, his legs did not want to try anything reliable for the moment and he leaned against the emergency door doing breathing exercises. He touched his jaw scar again, in case it was weeping something sticky and beigish down his neck and on to his shirt. During that foundation year at university when he started his mature student degree they were asked to read a novel by Anthony Trollope called Can You Forgive Her? in which one of the characters – George Something – had a face scar that at stress moments seemed to get very lively and dangerous. Ember had sympathized.

  So, one devilish possibility had to be that the body did not, in fact, come to Ember from a business rival looking to get him Botany Bayed, but from one of Honorée’s very best and glossiest chums. Adrian, annihilated and fly-tipped here, was the kind of mischievous little trick Iles could pull if Honorée really had been one of Adrian’s and the pimp had turned on her. That way he’d qualify for some Iles-type justice. As he would see it, a girl called Honorée deserved to be honoured.

  Also, there were deeper considerations, weren’t there? How about the hint given by Cologne to Ralph that he intended getting rid of Harpur’s daughter’s boyfriend Scott Grant, because he’d initiated the Chilton Park shoot-out and might cause more bother. Had Iles decided he’d do something on Harpur’s behalf, and the girl’s? Iles might be capable of that. In a way, of course, this would be strange. Everyone knew that Iles had an interest in Hazel Harpur. It did not matter that the ACC was married and also visited Honorée from time to time. He liked a roam. God, though, the influence of girls! Iles could have dropped Adrian off knowing that Ember must feel compelled to make him disappear efficiently, fast and in secret because of his mission to get the Monty up to a brilliantly elite rating alongside the Athenaeum. Media publicity featuring a bare, pulped pimp on club land would inevitably knock that fine purpose. So, divert the clear-up task to good old Ralph. Ember could become one of Iles’s hellbent Operations.

  And Ralph’s panic came because he wondered what would happen if he failed to shift Adrian to somewhere that gave no possible traces, and, instead, notified police headquarters about him, as would be the normal drill for most people who found a murdered body. In that case, Iles might do everything he could to fix the death on Ember. Iles’s everythings were a lot. You did not become ACC (Operations) without a flair for craft and tireless hunting. Iles would know others might see a motive link from Adrian via Honorée to him, or even via the boy, Scott Grant: Ralph might not be the only one who’d heard that threat.

  And/or there could be trade results. At present a very sensible, constructive arrangement still more or less functioned between Iles and Ember and Mansel Shale, in the wholesale drugs enterprise, though several factors had weakened this lately. As long as Ember and Manse kept violence off the streets, Iles did not get difficult about the dealing. He believed there would always be drugs and thought it pointless, absurd, to fight the supply. National policy was gradually catching up on his view. But if Ember failed to cart Adrian off somewhere and immediately, this brilliant alliance with the Assistant Chief might end. Ember would be persecuted, even charged. Mansel Shale could slip into monopoly, a monopoly of £1,200,000 a year, untaxable. Plainly, Ember must stop this or he would never be able to buy legality, respectability, purity. In Godfather 1, Michael Corleone promises that the family will be legitimate in five years. Instead, the slide gets faster. Ember must resist that. Of course, it could be Manse himself who, for some reasons of his own, did Adrian, and then arranged that Ember should have the corpse. There had been that suggested cooperation between Manse and Ember, hadn’t there, to look after Scott Grant? Perhaps Manse had done Adrian as his part of the joint venture, and now he bequeathed Ralph the body to do his share of the project. Or, of course, Manse might hope Ember would get caught for the killing and put away, leading to that blessed state of Manse monopoly.

  Ember bent closer to the corpse, wanting to see whether Adrian clutched a letter in one of his fists, such as, Get rid of him, Ralph, there’s a dear. This would be the kind of fruity insolence Iles was capable of, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? They reckoned that, way back, Iles might have seen off two lads found not guilty of killing an undercover cop, a verdict Iles disliked and decided should be adjusted. Ember wouldn’t have been surprised to read: Destroy this note after reading, Ralphy. Do not retain for your archive at Harvard.

  Ember found no message and went back into the deserted club. He took off his suit and put on a pair of dungarees kept in the office cupboard for maintenance tasks. Yes, burn tomorrow. Although some panic fragments remained, he could cope with the change of clothes, his fingers more or less capable on the buttons, and his balance OK for standing one-legged while getting into the dungaree trousers. He knew he would reach normality again in a
while. This was why he detested the nickname Panicking Ralph, or much worse, Panicking Ralphy. These spasms did come, yes, but they never lasted, not long enough to justify the slur. As the sweat and the leg weakness and the jaw scar delusions faded, he brought his Saab around without lights on to Adrian and opened the boot. Luckily, it was lined with a big plastic tray. That could go into the incinerator, too. He felt ashamed of incinerating plastic because of the pollution factor. Burning this tray and the clothes would produce considerable smoke, and could be regarded as hypocritical. But normally when he was arguing in print for more cleanliness and care he did not have the sort of sharp problem created by Adrian Cologne.

  In the future, as soon as he began to raise the Monty to a more refined category, one of the first club events Ember would discontinue was the kind of après-funeral shindig that took place there today. Yes, he knew the proverb saying nobody should speak ill of the dead, but this did not necessarily mean you had to open your club to Adrian Cologne’s relatives, associates, girls and minder-muscle. Ember was amazed that Adrian actually had relatives, or, at least, relatives who would want to admit, even demonstrate, they were relatives, through attending his funeral and follow-up. All right, all right, possibly people went back to the Athenaeum after the funeral of a member or relative of a member in London, but the member or relative would most likely be some sort of genuine dignitary, known at All Souls College, Oxford, or the Inns of Court, or Whitehall, not a pimp. And if he was an Athenaeum pimp it would be for undoubtedly well-dressed girls who could ask really bumper payments on the best West End street corners, such as in Shepherd Market. Also, his relatives would not look how Adrian’s relatives looked. Occasionally, Ember wondered whether it was harsh and snobby to make these judgements on some people and their appearance. They could not help their obvious baseness. No, they fucking couldn’t. That was the point, wasn’t it? One of Cologne’s cousins lived locally and had Monty membership, or Ralph would not have felt obliged to let them all into the club post funeral. It might have been the cousin who told Cologne about Morton Cross possibilities and brought him to the city.