by Bill James
‘There being four As on each side of the van, you can move about for your squints and watch a truly wide stretch. A panorama? Would that be the term? You’re in there casting an eye through them capital A facilities, left, right, distant, close, up, down, and nobody knows. Think of one of them German U-boat submarines in the last war, concealed under the ocean, its periscope up but part hidden by waves and the captain watching a convoy and deciding which ship to hit. Same for us. To people outside it’s just a van with a name starting with one of them As so as to be high in the phone book list and get noticed due to the alphabet. They think the driver and maybe passengers are at work in one of the backyards nearby tidying up a rockery or spreading beneficial mulch.
‘Leave your BMW with us, Tom, and we’ll give it a top-class service while you’re absent on this important jaunt. When the spy job in the van is finished I might want you for something else, but then using your own car, so it got to be just right and prime. Ariadne, our motors lady, will get it up to super-perfect, plugs, points, suspension, the lot! She lives under bonnets, hair bunned tight at the back so it don’t dangle into brake fluid etcetera, which would be of no advantage to anyone.
‘The thing is, Tom, Jamie and the Volvo might not be available for this future trundle. He got some churchy thing on. He’s like that, not all the time but intermittent,’ Leo Percival Young said. ‘If it was one of the others in the firm I’d tell him, “The church can go stuff itself. Your stipend here is bigger than the archbishop’s so I want you on call, not idling in some holy pew trying to look mild and godly.” But this is Jamie, and Jamie I got to offer max respect to, haven’t I, Tom?’
Leo gave a shrug, but not a shrug meaning casualness, a shrug and slight hunching up and lip bite that meant he blamed himself for being stupid and shouldn’t have said what he’d just said. ‘But you wouldn’t know about Jamie’s role, would you? You’re new. You haven’t caught up on the firm’s history yet. I’ll explain: Jamie and me – well we’ve seen off a lot of trouble together. It could be described as “a mutuality” if you’re familiar with that word. It’s like support both ways – me to him and him to me. That’s mutuality – taking, giving. Very much so. I mean years. I mean the long, hard march towards present comfiness via good profitability. Things like that don’t happen without a lot of work, Tom – it’s not just luck. Difficult bastards have to be smashed and walked over and on, the bastards. They got to learn they’re fucking blockages and have to be cleared. Jamie was always there as reinforcement. He seems quiet and a piety fan sometimes, but just put a Browning in his hand and you’ll note a difference. This sort of completes his wardrobe.
‘All right, he buys them sodding rest-home cardigans and sometimes – you got to believe this – sometimes he’ll wear moccasin style brown shoes, bold as you like, as if it was normal. Well, moccasins was normal – for Red Indians. But he don’t come to work on a mustang. We got to put up with kinks of Jamie’s sort for the sake of what he can do, though – the driving mainly, yes, but other aspects such as laundering our cash intake with no filthy, nosy, intelligent awkwardnesses from the law or the Revenue, and steaming his way around an accounts book. Jiggery-pokery – he can spot it in just a glance at a cash column. Instant, like a holy revelation. Figures talk to him. They got their own lingo and Jamie knows it fluent.
‘You can see him have a little smile or a pout at what they’re telling him – saying that things are going super-great, or that someone’s not playing right, someone’s doing a shameless percentage of rotten skimming and personal pocketing. Me and you, if we looked at them figures, they’d be just figures. We can count OK, yes, and do the multiplication tables up to sevens or eights, but we don’t hear the tune them figures are playing – their deep message, that holiness of communication I just referred to. They might tell us a tale eventual, but it would be very eventual, maybe too late eventual, the damage having been done. We’d have to ponder, maybe spend an hour with the calculator. Jamie? It’s like what’s known as an “instinct” with him. Precious, Tom. Consider a hare in a field and he sees a greyhound coming. That hare knows from instincts he better get sprinting off. This is built in with the hare. It’s an instinct. Jamie’s like that with numbers. All right, he can get a bit independent at times, which might be a fucking full-scale pain, but that’s another of them factors we got to accept on account of his knacks.
‘Of course, it was Jamie who gave me the pointer that leads to this – leads to you in the ACME van doing a peep session on our behalf. The van’s got a commode for extended duty. This is important. Didn’t that wrong shooting of the Brazilian boy up in London happen because one of the surveillance went for at least a piss? When God planned the human body and its ways, he didn’t give all that much thought to excretory problems during a big stretch of surveillance. You won’t get any of that in the book of Genesis. People in them early days was mostly in the desert where such difficulties never cropped up owing to plenty of sand dunes where it was possible at all times to have a crouch or just a stand-up.
‘This commode is bolted to the side of the van, so it won’t go sliding about and tipping over, slopping over, when you’re cornering, say, creating unpleasantness. Ariadne, plus a power hose, would clean it up, yes, but fortunately that won’t ever be necessary. Also, Thermos flasks in a little rack. You should fill them with tea or coffee or soup before you start in case it’s a long stretch watching. This has got to be run like military. The flasks are super-flasks and will keep stuff warm, or cold, for at least twenty hours.’
‘Detailed planning is always important,’ Tom said.
‘Detailed planning is,’ Leo replied. He sounded joyful. ‘It’s because I knew you would share the thought that I picked you for this task.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re new, as I’ve said, but I got that impression of you. Instant. This ability is referred to as “man management flair”. Many would say I possess it, so I’m not just being boastful. I get a sort of feeling when someone seems so right – and when someone seems so wrong, naturally. The flair is the valuable bit of the feeling, but it’s the management bit that tells me how to make the difference between yes and no, isn’t it, between right and wrong? Think of a great piano player, Tom. It’s his or her flair that provides all the emotion when he or she’s into an Albert Hall gig, but it’s the management side of him or her that makes sure he or she don’t keep banging the wrong notes and fucking it all up, with booing and fruit from the audience. I get this feeling re you Tom – the right feeling, but not just feeling, management judgement, too.’
‘Thanks.’ Tom wondered whether it all meant he was accepted now as one of the firm. Parts of what Leo said delighted him. It sounded as if Tom would land a mission to handle solo – the ACME project. This was trust. This was integration. And then another assignment later because Jamie might not be around, but bunking off to church. Equality with Jamie in Leo’s opinion – definitely a plus. So, Leo and the rest of the leadership had faith in him to cope OK with whatever these operations were, did they? So – to go more basic than that – they believed in him altogether now, as the latest entrant to the firm, did they? ‘You’re new,’ Leo had said. That meant Tom was in, didn’t it – all right, newly in, but in. “New” suggested a context for him to be new in, a setting, and this context and the setting was the firm, wasn’t it? That programme of buy, buy more, then buy more still, had worked, had convinced all round.
However, ‘Leave your BMW, Tom.’ This piece of the briefing he didn’t care for so much. It was spoken by Leo as offhand, routine, of no great significance. But that could be a ploy. Was Tom being sent off somewhere in this commodious van so they could give the BMW a total frisk, hunting a trace bug and/or eavesdropping bug, and anything else that might hint where Tom came from, who he was, besides Tom Parry?
‘Yes, you’re new, Tom, so I got to explain the structure of the firm, its sinews and ligaments, we might say, comparing it to the human frame. We’ve just been d
iscussing the body as to excretion, but now I’m using it as what’s known as a metaphor – but probably I don’t have to tell you that. A metaphor for comparing the way the body’s put together with the way a firm is, or this firm, anyway. Such as we speak of the “head” of a firm, being myself, but it’s also got other resemblances.’
L.P. Young lived in a converted and extended Victorian farmhouse, Midhurst, on a hillside overlooking the city and beyond to the sea. He had invited Tom there. They sat in brown leather easy chairs facing each other drinking tea in what Young referred to as the drawing room. It looked out on to a gravelled yard in front of the house and, to its right, several outbuildings in stone. Young had made the tea himself. He said his wife had gone into town for a meeting of the museum committee, which she was chair of for a two-year stint. ‘Really ancient things, she loves them, Tom, understands them.’
‘Known as heritage,’ Tom said.
‘She’s familiar with all aspects of it. Mention the word “time” to her or “centuries” and she’ll immediately see ramifications and can discuss them straight off.’
‘Museums can tell us much about ourselves.’ Tom felt it vital to go along with the half-baked nature of this conversation. It suggested geniality and friendship, beyond mere business concerns.
‘Cavemen, for instance, and their early drawings of behemoths on the stone,’ Leo said. ‘They needed something sharp and strong to do that with, otherwise they would have had to give up and we’d have no idea of behemoths. A museum can show us them hard tools that made the behemoth pictures possible.’
‘It’s a mark of high civilization in a society that it’s interested in its distant past,’ Tom said.
‘This is a trading firm, Tom,’ Leo replied, ‘the trade being in what are known as “recreational commodities”, or to put it simpler, gear. Well, that’s obvious.’ He crossed to a fine rosewood antique bureau. He took a rolled ordnance survey map of the city from one of the drawers and spread it on the flap of the bureau. Tom stood and went to join him looking down at it. Leo put a hand vertical, resting on the length of his little finger, at the centre, marking a division. ‘Think of my hand as like the late Berlin Wall. To the left of this, the west of the city, is our territory, Tom, our sphere, if you know that term.’ He turned his hand flat and rested his palm on the left half to show possession, to show command, to show achievement in the spots where he and Jamie had smashed difficult bastards and walked over and on them, the bastards, teaching them what blockages they really were and the need to clear them.
‘Things are not so clear to the right, the east – there are battles between outfits there all the time as slices of ground are claimed by this one or that one or that one, how things used to be about Czechoslovakia in Hitler times. It’s messy. It’s primitive and wasteful. AK 47s, machetes, torchings, a disgusting fucking absence of what is known as decorum, Tom, meaning in good order. Some of that might be necessary at the start when building a firm and getting rid of the bastards who might be a fucking blockage, I admit, but this goes on and goes on. However, what we got on the west is nice and settled and brilliantly civic now. Look around the west and you won’t see one site where a property has been arsonized.’ He let the map roll itself up and returned it to the drawer. They went to sit in their chairs again.
‘This area – the west of the city – is a lot of ground, Tom, with a selection of all sorts. I mean different classes of people, different grades of people – that kind of thing. I don’t want to be snobby, but it’s got to be admitted the population of these isles, the GB isles, can be very mixed. There are men and women out there who don’t have no idea what “decorum” even means. That wouldn’t include you, Tom, I’m sure.
‘So, I’ve tried to divide our parish up into, like, sections. Three sections. I give them names. There’s Section Arabella, called after my dear mother, God rest her soul, a woman worthy of remembrance, which all who knew her would admit without even minor hesitation. It’s the north of our ground, an area gracing her: streets broad and tree-lined, very clean, Sealyhams on leads, detached properties, that kind of thing. The centre I think of as Montgomery Section, reminding of that great soldier in the Second World War, taking the Jerry surrender in a tent on a heath, very crisp and victorious. The south is Millennium Section, to mark how time moves on constant and demanding, bringing change, which Emily will confirm. For instance, it can’t be BC no longer but is very AD, because, of course, you couldn’t refer to a time as BC until you was into AD. BC people didn’t know they was BC, because there wasn’t no C.’
‘All these area names have quite a ring to them, a resonance,’ Tom replied.
‘What I aimed for. You’ve hit it – resonance. That’s what I mean, you see, Tom.’
‘What, Leo?’
‘This feeling I get of rightness – when someone is right, that is. That word “resonance”, it’s not a word I would come up with spontaneous, although I know about it, and when I hear it from you I realize it’s the exact word for it. This is two minds in a kind of harmony.’ Then he spoke slowly, weightily, intoning like an awards ceremony, or the runner’s names announced at a greyhound track: ‘Arabella, Montgomery, Millennium: yes, resonance.’
‘These three words take strength from each other and, spoken together, become a sort of impressive chant, or a bold drum roll,’ Tom declared. It was necessary.
‘Here, again, metaphors. This is more mutuality,’ Leo said. ‘The three helping each other towards a grand effect.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Now, each of these sections has its own staff and its own local chieftain. This is what’s known in the commercial scene’s terminology as “delegation”. That’s to say, I give them the power to look after their particular district and make sure that region of the business hits target or even better.’
‘Many companies function like that. They have their headquarters where the chairman and chief executive work, and then branches maybe all over the country or even the world, each with its own head man or woman,’ Tom stated.
‘The same with the police,’ Leo replied.
‘Well, yes.’
‘In London, the Commissioner – top man. And then in all the boroughs, as the sections are called there, other top men or women in charge of their area. They are the top man or woman in that particular region but not as much a top man or woman as the Commissioner.’
‘Or Rupert Murdoch and his empire.’ Tom could have done without this mention of the police, but thought he kept his face reasonably blank, reasonably non-panicked. He’d wanted to get off that topic, though.
‘Murdoch, yes. He’s the boss of bosses, but sometimes things can go wrong with one of them lower level execs. Think of the News of the World, Tom, or, more vulgar, News of the Screws – its collapse. Now, the thing is, you see, I’ve got trouble with a local manager, too. This is in Arabella.’
‘North section?’
‘It’s always a danger with delegation. You can get let down. They are supposed to work on behalf of you, but, of course, they are not you yourself as such, and they might drift off in a foully selfish mode. As my dad used to tell us, “If you want a job done right, do it yourself.”’
‘Murdoch himself had to come to Britain to try to sort it all out.’
‘This is not to do with phone hacking but serious matters for the business. Action’s got to be took, Tom. A priority.’
‘I’d trust your judgement on that.’
‘There’s a lad called Scray, Justin Paul Scray, controlling things in Arabella for me,’ Leo Young replied. ‘We done a lot of research on him, and Scray seems to be his real name, although I never heard of any Scrays before. Martin Abidan said the family might of been immigrants way back – that’s centuries, not now – from some country where Scray was quite a usual name, such as Germany or Mongolia. Scray could mean a carpenter or a blacksmith in one of them places, the way we have names such as Carpenter and Smith. People can’t be blamed for their names.’ Le
o paused. Then he snarled: ‘I mentioned he’s controlling things for me in Arabella. I want to pull that statement back. I think he’s controlling things, but controlling some of the things, and most likely the juiciest things, for himself, the bastard, not for the firm.
‘Or not the firm as you and me think of the firm, Tom. No, his own sort of splinter firm. Basically, that’s what your trip in the van is all about. And if you’re in the back, Tom, scanning, and a local who’s seen the ACME LAWN AND GARDEN SERVICES words comes, like, inquiring to the driver’s cabin because he wants help with wisteria on a pergola, that kind of thing, you just got to stay quiet and not seen until he goes away. We don’t need no complications. This is a delicate campaign.’
‘You want me to take the van to Arabella?’
‘This is a district recalling memories of my mother, so my anger at Scray’s behaviour is greater than if it was in Montgomery or Millennium. It’s an insult to her, a considerable disrespect. But, no. Though Arabella is where the problem starts – to Justin Scray’s mighty shame, he knows it’s named after my mother – yes, it’s where the problem starts but not where we deal with it at this junction.’
‘Too head-on?’
‘Too hasty, Tom. Not enough info, not enough research.’
‘You’re very careful, Leo. Scrupulous.’
‘That’s another of them perfect words that shows you grasp a situation although new to the firm.’
‘Scrupulous. Measured.’
‘In this kind of vocation we got to be. This is not like, say, being a doctor or a colonel where there are rules of the game such as the oath where doctors promise to do what they can in surgery hours to keep people alive. We don’t have an oath like that. How could we? People in this type of career got to work out for theirselves how to stay alive, perhaps with help from bodyguards if the expense is not too much: someone to get between you and the bullets for a good fee. We have to supply our own rules for the profession, and one of these says we should have proper, thorough info before turning against a member of the firm, especially if that member had enough going for him previous to get him to number three. I mentioned doctors. If a doctor’s going to get struck off, as they call it, because he been dicking patients as part of the treatment, there has to be proper info from the women before he can get kicked out. Them patients must prove penetration on a consulting room couch with unnecessary removal of undergarments – unnecessary from the medical aspect, that is. It’s got some other purpose, i.e., the penetration while people out in the waiting room have to hang about. The details are different but we must prove absolutely re Scray and his carry-on in the firm – that is, in the firm and not in the firm.’