by M. H. Baylis
Rex’s mind was racing. ‘Why did he change his plea then?’
‘Because he wanted to be a hero, but he couldn’t. He realised he was going to die in that place, and he was terrified. When I visited, he pleaded with me to tell the truth.’
‘What did you say?’
She looked at him blankly. ‘I said no. That killed him, I think. But something was going to kill Yitzie soon, anyway.’
He stared at the road ahead. He realised that he hadn’t known even a corner of the woman next to him. He had thought of Rescha as a victim. Perhaps she was. But she made victims of everyone around her, too.
‘Yitzie loved you, didn’t he?’ he said, almost to himself.
They were nearing the Angel Road roundabout. The vast, Lego-like block of the IKEA store hove into view, navy blue and yellow against a grey sky laced with pylons but otherwise as empty as the marshes. The traffic was thick and fast here. Where had the sirens gone?
Rescha wasn’t paying attention to the traffic. She just gave Rex an inscrutable look and said, ‘I expect he believed he did.’ Then she floored the accelerator. A lorry horn blared, and as the massive vehicle clattered close past them, Rex realised she was jerking the steering wheel towards it. And the car was out of control, careering onto a furious roundabout, towards its barren centre, and destruction.
She didn’t fight him. She’d just given up, surrendered to death. In his last conscious moments, he was aware of pulling her slender body out of the way, and grabbing the steering wheel, stabbing, with his one good foot, down into the gloom of the footwell and trying to push her unyielding limbs out of the way of the pedals. He heard more horns and shattering glass, there was spinning, and a name suddenly popping into his head like a letter through a flap. Kuznetz. The Kaliker. The cripple. This one, long-ago extinguished soul that had changed so many lives. Ended them, too. But who was he? He only knew his name. He wondered if Terry would find out more. There was no time for him, Rex, to discover anything else. Because this was his end.
* * *
Liverpool. City of malt and salt-breezes. Cries of gulls and the strange, phlegm-hawking talk of the natives. To an old sailor it felt like home, but I wasn’t going to let that happen. Every day the newspapers had more of it: synagogues burned, lodging houses ransacked, police raiding factories and workshops in the wake of the mess they’d dubbed the Outrage.
Starting to creep up the country, too, the madness. In Manchester, a mob angry about foreigners taking their jobs went and smashed up a soup kitchen for unemployed Jews. Not much logic to that, when you think about it.
Meanwhile, one of my two fine dung-headed colleagues lay dead, the other dying, and no one to say Kaddish for them. I tried not to be seen reading the reports too much.
Leah and I booked ourselves into a smelly little hotel just off the Dock Road, run by a pair of sweaty Austrian brothers, twins. Like Cain and Abel, they are, only in German. Say that again I’ll strangle you in your bed you fat fairy… You couldn’t get a decent hold on your own cock you suet pudding. Fight so much they don’t even notice who stays. Some only come for an hour. Always in twos.
I decided I would be George Kovacs while I stayed here, which would not be for long – just until the next boat to New York. In the worst sort of tavern at the worst end of the docks, they showed me to a Laskar who, in return for ten shillings, knocked me up some papers in that name, not good, but good enough to buy time, if needed. I like the name. Hungarian for Kuznetz. I spent the morning at the Cunard Offices, asking about tickets. One ticket. One-way. If I could give the massed forces of his Imperial Majesty’s Okhrana the slip, I reckoned, then I could get rid of one girl. Somehow. Though the precise means kept eluding me.
Man behind a hatchway told me, in the snot-clogged way of the place, nothing free this week – nutn freee dis wiicchh serr – third class or second. Come back next. The longer I waited, the more risk of someone finding out something, or the girl letting it out. Or else this whole strange isle of ham-limbed drunkards being advised by their newspapers to seek out and slaughter every foreigner in the land. They’d have to start with their own Royal Family, of course.
Went back to our little room – it smelt of smoke, burning paper. Leah was full of excitement. ‘I’ve been out myself,’ she said – said it like a challenge because I told her not to, not without me. ‘To the Lutheran Seamen’s Chapel. I told the pastor, my fiancé’s a Hungarian and we want to marry. What do we need to do? He said you can do it this afternoon, no questions asked, half a crown for the certificate, ten bob and a bottle for himself.’
I sat on the bed. ‘Who’s this Hungarian gentile you’re marrying then?’
‘Now George Kovacs, I believe you’re teasing me.’
I took a deep breath. Better to tell her how it stood.
‘I’m a Jew, I stays a Jew, and I’m sailing to America as soon as I can get a berth. You’re not coming with me.’
Watched her face. Waiting for the trembling lip. Nothing came. Then: ‘Sailing on those Hungarian papers of yours, would it be, George?’ she asked, sweetly. ‘Only I accidentally dropped them into the fire just a while ago.’
I looked at the girl. Slap her or murder her. Couldn’t decide.
‘You see, I’ve been thinking a lot, George. And how I see it is this. I killed Mr Parks. But there’s only you the witness to that, and only me the witness to what you’ve been up to. So that kind of binds us together, doesn’t it? Now. I think this is a very fair city. And we’ve got a nice pile of money, haven’t we? More than enough to settle down and open a nice business and keep a fine little house. And we can’t do that without being married, can we, George?’
Like an April tide. Gentle and inviting one minute. A bitch that’ll see you drowned the next. Elephant and Torch might have been dung-heads, but they had some wisdom about them.
I went back to the tavern. The Laskar wasn’t there. The landlord recognised me though – asked too many questions so I moved off swift. I had to get new papers, but where to go?
In the meantime, same day Elephant died in the hospital, I had to marry the girl in a sort of molten fury. Pastor hardly knows where to look. Afterwards I stalked off, up, up the big hill, until I couldn’t walk anymore from the pains down my back and legs, then into a pub full of coloured glass and light, like one of their churches, a temple to their Higson’s Bitter. Poured glass after glass into me, glasses of that watery, sour stuff they love so much, until the anger was doused.
A mere squall, I told myself. A delay in port. Play along for a few weeks, then just find a way out. Married man now – certificate to prove it. One Janos Kovacs, lately of Buda, now of Bootle Docks. Not watertight, but better than it was standing there on Scotland Road with Missus Cutter’s house burning down and a manhunt working its way across the marshes. Better than it is for Elephant and Torch.
A married man.
Slid into a hansom cab for the way back to the docks – or as far as the snivelling coward of a cabbie would dare take me. Started thinking of the duties of a married man. And the rights. I had some bad thoughts, I will own to that.
Thought – if she wanted to be a wife, Mrs Kovacs could give me some of what I’d longed for, before this mess, and probably – no, for certain – what got me into it.
Picture it on the ride home. Frilled linens coming down, ribbons unthreading to lay bare soft, white limbs. Pinkness. Heat and scents and hair and fullness. Some compensations, in life, there have to be. She is a beautiful shiksa, I think, and now she is mine, and I think I hate her, and I’ve a mind to go back and crash out all that hate that’s in me right between her fat milky thighs and let’s hear her squeal with it.
Right. In. Braces down. Breeches off. At that point, even a good Bible-schooled girl like Leah can see what her new husband has in mind. She’s out the other side like a Daugava eel on the mud-flats, got a boot in her hand to throw.
‘The only way you’ll be doing that is by force, George Kovacs, and if it harms the bab
y then you’ll have another death on your conscience!’
She might as well have thrown the boot at my head. ‘What baby?’ says I, stupidly, sitting on the bed, feeling it wither.
‘Mr Parks put that… that thing of his in me two months ago and I haven’t bled since. It’s his. I don’t mind a baby but no one’s ever doing that to me again.’
Gizzard-hearted black-tongued bitch’s bastard’s Turk’s whore. I cursed her and God and my own sorry fate as I grabbed up my things. Couldn’t find the bag, just rolled them up in a shirt, before I’d even got my own breeches back on. Ship, I thought. Get on a ship. Any one. I’ll even take the Isle of fucking Man.
‘Steady on, George. You won’t get far without your money.’
I stopped. ‘You burnt that too?’
She laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. I put it nice and safe in a savings account this afternoon while you were out drinking.’
Shema Yisroel. Hear O Israel. The Lord, Our God, the Lord is one. One He might be, but there’s a greater and a worser power than He.
Epilogue
After the funeral, Susan and Terry went to the pub for a drink. It had to be a quick one, because there were busy times ahead. While the van containing Rescha Schild and Rex Tracey was ploughing across the Angel Road roundabout, Susan had been in a final meeting with the directors of a large, well-respected, left-leaning daily national newspaper.
The upshot was that, starting in a month’s time, northeast London would have a new weekly paper: half focussed on the local, as before, but half looking beyond to the global. This would come out on a Friday, encouraging readers to invest in the heftier weekend edition of the national paper. It would be pretty much everything Susan had ever dreamed of doing in the first place – running a quality, politically and socially engaged local paper – though admittedly with less editorial control. In spite of the sombre occasion, she was happy, which was why she’d ordered champagne, to the astonishment of the landlord, whose patrons generally celebrated with vodka and Red Bull, in the rare event of them having anything to celebrate at all.
‘I could never have swung it without your undercover mosque stuff,’ she said to Terry at the bar. ‘I’d been telling them we had national-quality staff, and they looked pretty stupid when they finally realised I was telling them the truth.’
‘Glad to get back to my Christian ways though,’ said Terry, taking a deep swig of his champagne. Then he looked around him, at the empty, yeasty-smelling room, and his face fell.
‘Doesn’t feel right, though, does it? Doing this without him. We shouldn’t be celebrating.’
‘Listen, Terry, believe me, Rex will be celebrating.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Well, maybe not right now. But when he gets out, he’ll have a great deal to be happy about. He’ll be back on the nationals – more or less. With, thanks to your researches, a major story to write about the two Outrages. Plus, he’s in line for some sort of medal for steering that van to safety and averting God knows how many deaths.’
‘Not to mention solving the murders and clearing a dead man’s name.’
‘Who’d have thought Rex Tracey would know how to switch on the voice recorder on his phone?’
They drank in silence for a while.
‘Christ,’ Terry said finally. ‘The little bastard’s going to be unbearable, isn’t he?’
‘Insufferable,’ agreed Susan. ‘Let’s hope they keep him in for a while.’
Copyright
First published in 2014
by Old Street Publishing Ltd
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This ebook edition first published in 2014
All rights reserved
© M.H. BAYLIS, 2014
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ISBN 978–1–908699–68–8