by Bill James
Because of that almost farcical carry-on at The Monty and its coverage in ‘I Spy’, Lamb and maybe others would be watchful for any further out-of-the-ordinary developments. Justin at Darien, asking for a squint at what Lamb had there, might be regarded as one of those further out-of-the-ordinary developments. That could put him in danger, although he’d come with a recommendation from one of Liz’s brilliantly clean contacts. There were some very rough, not entirely aesthetic, dealers who might themselves see off those they regarded as possible competitors/enemies, or pay a professional heavies firm to do it for them. The huge money potentially involved could breed unlimited violence. In the abnormally excited situation here at the moment, Justin might be suspected at once for what he, in fact, very much was: a competitor/enemy.
Possibly, then, Liz would need to recommend a postponement to George Dinnick, or a switch away from Lamb and his collection, at least for the present. Darien was not the only house with attractive, genuine, potentially available works. Justin’s safety had to be paramount, for her. George might understand this. Or he might not. Or he might understand it and hate it.
Earlier today, she’d picked up the hire car at the station and driven to Shield Terrace, then meter-parked at a spot from which she could watch The Monty for a while through the Peugeot’s rear window. Because of movie and television cop dramas, people assumed that anyone doing surveillance on a building from a stationary car would be in the front seat and viewing through the windscreen. This could be conspicuous, and especially if you were as tall as Liz. The back was better.
She couldn’t have said how better today, though. What did she aim to find by gazing at the facade of this drinking club? It was still before noon, when few, if any, customers would turn up. Even if some did they might mean nothing to Liz. But she’d needed some definite, tangible start location for, admittedly, a very vague, emotionally slanted inquiry. Yes, an info famine. Whatever else it might not be, The Monty at eleven Shield Terrace was tangible, definitely tangible: a passably impressive grey-stone, two-storey building, late Victorian or Edwardian, she’d guess.
A glass-sided, slate-roofed ground-floor porch led to the club’s black main door, closed at present. She could see no name board over the porch or anywhere else saying this was The Monty. She thought most big, traditional London clubs would be like that – anonymous, except for those who belonged. You either knew about them or you didn’t, and you weren’t the sort the clubs wanted to be found by if you didn’t know how to find them. They had their own catch twenty-two long before it appeared in book and film form. These clubs favoured discretion. Possibly, Ralph Ember wanted discretion for his club, too. He hadn’t seen much of that lately. Zooming blobs of Worcestershire sauce didn’t rate as discretion. But Ralph’s ambition might still exist undimmed. The club stood on a corner of the Terrace, with a tarmacked car park-cum-delivery yard on one side and to the back. The district looked scruffy and due for redevelopment any day or year now, but she thought the handsome Monty building might survive.
She’d been in position for about twenty minutes when she saw the club door open, and two men stepped out into the porch. Almost at once she’d recognized Basil Gordon Loam from the Press picture. She assumed the other must be Ralph Ember, proprietor. The slight hesitation in identifying Gordon Loam had followed from surprise that the pair seemed so amiable with each other, smiling super-chummily as they shook hands. If it was Ember, he must be exceptionally forgiving. After all, Gordon Loam had only recently given The Monty the kind of distinction any club owner would detest and strive to avoid. In lurid nightmares, Ember might see advertisements for Monty membership: Join Now And Play The Ricochet Game. He’d probably wake up doing a fair imitation of that famous Munch pic, The Scream.
She recalled from the newspaper column the description ‘El Cid lookalike, Mr Ember’, which had puzzled her at the time. Now, though, she could see what was meant. Ember did resemble Charlton Heston, the Hollywood star who had played El Cid so stunningly, a film that still got a showing now and then on one of the movie channels: the long, craggy features, ship’s prow nose, epic shoulders, disciplined waist. Ember did have a long, facial scar, though, which Heston had lacked.
Of course, she realized that the lavish enthusiasm of the handshake might be a total deception, each trying to con the other into a belief that they enjoyed hearty comradeliness, even mutual devotion. Just because Ember looked like someone who played the supremely honourable and trustworthy El Cid, it didn’t signify Ember had to be honourable and trustworthy, especially to someone who’d gone gun-mad in the club.
And then, Gordon Loam. Liz felt again that she might have glimpsed him somewhere in a gallery or auction room or both, and had thought at the time he might have some sort of devious, sly, catch-as-catch-can function in the art business – the kind of devious, sly, catch-as-catch-can function Liz, Justin and George Dinnick had themselves. Today Gordon Loam wore green cord trousers and a brown leather jacket over a scarlet shirt. Perhaps he’d been dressed something like that at this previous encounter? Had she thought it an unnerving mixture of county-set and mildly bohemian style? But she realized she might be manufacturing memories to fit what she could see now.
Gordon Loam had gone to the car park for his Audi, and Liz climbed over into the front seat of the Peugeot and started the engine, ready to tag him. She crouched down in case he came her way. Just before she did this, though, she’d glanced back at Ember, who’d stayed standing in the porch watching Gordon Loam depart. None of the previous geniality remained in his face. He stared at Gordon Loam’s back, as if to get familiar with its topography. She heard the Audi pass, waited a couple of seconds with her head below the dashboard, then sat up and got on Gordon Loam’s trail.
ELEVEN
Iles said: ‘This “I Spy”, Col. Not good.’
‘In which respect, sir?’ Harpur said.
‘I have to keep a balance in the city.’
‘Few would say you fail on that.’
‘Which fucking few?’
‘I’ve heard visitors exclaim in restaurants or The Corval Museum, “This is the most balanced city I’ve ever come across, and I’ve been to Toledo and Winnipeg.” Of course, they don’t realize it’s thanks to you, because if they’re tourists from far off they might, regrettably, never have heard of you. Almost incredible given the global spread of vital information these days, but not impossible. Often I feel like confiding to them, “It’s all Assistant Chief Iles’s doing. Mr Iles and balance, they are as one.”’
‘You trying to tell me you go to museums, Harpur?’
‘But I know you’re not one to want recognition and acclaim for your achievements, much as those achievements deserve recognition and acclaim.’
‘We ought to get down to see Ralph Ember,’ Iles replied.
‘On what account, sir?’
‘Urgent, Col. He won’t let this rest.’
‘What?’
‘Why I speak of balance.’
‘Right.’
The ACC was in one of his made-to-measure, double-breasted, grey, three-piece suits, with white silk shirt, a silver and crimson tie and Charles Laity black lace-up shoes, the ensemble probably worth well over one thousand pounds, especially if they made him two pairs of trousers to share wear. He said: ‘I don’t claim to be on my own in bringing that balance and peace to a needy city and, indeed, world. That would be vanity and egomania. Now and then you help, Col, despite everything.’
‘Thank you, sir. Despite which everything?’
‘Oh, yes,’ the ACC answered. ‘“Despite everything” really sums it up.’
‘Sums what up?’
‘Oh, yes.’
They were in the ACC’s office suite, two rooms linked by folding doors, now open. He could pace a sort of circuit around the full area when under stress or deep into his own prime brand of self-pity. A long conference table and seven straight-backed chairs occupied one room. In the other, where they were now, he had his desk and
computer station plus a tall cheval mirror near the corridor door, so he could check his appearance if going out, especially when in uniform. The mirror was fixed at its middle to a mahogany frame, and the glass could be tilted. He kept it swung slightly forward, reflecting only from his shoulders down, because he loathed the shape of his Adam’s apple and would be seriously demoralized by glimpsing an image of it. Harpur thought that if Iles designed Assistant Chiefs’ uniforms as well as wearing one he’d create a tunic high-necked enough to contain and conceal Adam’s apples, like curtains around a hospital bed. Harpur knew the Assistant Chief’s contempt for Adam’s apples had nothing to do with the Garden of Eden and humanity’s fruity tumble into sin. It was the jutting, asymmetrical appearance of his that upset him. ‘Why me?’ he’d scream sometimes.
Frequently, out of comradely kindness, even pity, Harpur had told him he’d never heard anyone speak hurtfully or disgustedly about the ACC’s Adam’s apple, even though it did have its repugnant aspects. Iles would not be placated, though. In fact, Harpur had heard people comment harshly or jocosely on it, but there was no need to goad the Assistant Chief with repetition of such disrespect. When requisitioning furniture for his rooms, he must have emphasized that he did not want a mirror screwed flush to the wall but one that could be angled for his continued sanity and overall well-being. Harpur knew the ACC did not regard sanity and well-being as qualities that were his simply by nature and entitlement. They had to be worked for, schemed for, as with the cheval. He’d told Harpur he didn’t think much of Nature. Hadn’t Nature given him the ghastly fucking Adam’s apple? He had another of these cheval mirrors in the bedroom at home – Idylls, in Rougement Place.
Iles said: ‘Dear Ralph attempts to bring a little culture into that Shield Terrace shit-pit he runs, and what does he get in response?’
‘Well, it’s not exactly clear from the Press piece whether—’
‘Contumely, Col.’
‘Poor Ember.’
‘Do you know what it means?’
‘In his own way Ralph’s quite a progressive thinker,’ Harpur replied. ‘Yes, in his own way.’
‘Contumely – insult, insolence, bullets. Tell me this, Col, would you, please: how do I maintain that balance and peace in the streets if, at no distance from these headquarters, Ralph is getting a load of unprovoked contumely?’
‘Some problem, sir!’
Iles had the newspaper page containing the ‘I Spy’ column in front of him on his desk. He read – reread – it for a moment. ‘Who is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Gordon Loam.’
‘The family has slipped down the scale. Fortune in tea, but a long while ago. London mansion then. Gone. Some say an ancestor knew Joseph Stockdale well – the Stockdale Wellington told to “Publish and be damned” when Stockdale threatened to expose Wellington’s affair with Harriette Wilson, a court tart. Basil Gordon Loam gets an income from somewhere, though. Maybe an odd-job man in and around the art game. Fixer? Courier? Three daughters at the same private school as Ralph Ember’s. Not cheap. He’s done some time.’
‘How typical of Ralph to refuse compensation payment for the disgraceful damage caused from such a source. Judas money. There is a kind of largeness of mind, a kind of grandeur and nobility to Ralph Ember.’
‘Which kind exactly, sir?’
‘Yet this large-mindedness, this grandeur, this nobility, does not mean he’s a soft touch or will put up with maltreatment.’
‘Hardly.’
‘Blood will have blood, they say, Col.’
‘Who?’
‘Who what?’
‘Who says blood will have blood?’
‘I’m glad you asked that. Same with a beard.’ Iles pointed to a line at the bottom of the ‘I Spy’ column. ‘The point is, Col, surely, a beard is very near the head.’
‘Many would agree with that, I’m sure, though I’ve never heard a full debate on it.’
‘This is someone pulling out a gun in a drunken fit and rushing to place a couple of shots while the mood is still on him, a slave to impulse, a prisoner of waywardness. Or, perhaps he was so boozed, he feared the collage figure might shoot first. A sort of Gary Cooper High Noon situation.’
‘I doubt whether The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell people had handguns. Doesn’t “I Spy” say the target was naked? No holster or bandolier.’
‘You’re sober and might realize that, but this addled marksman must have been liquored-up and deluded. Perhaps he’d been sampling the Armagnac – Kressmann’s – that Ralph himself favours, and which I, personally, will take now and then for a change. How do we know Gordon Loam wasn’t aiming to get the figure terminally in its skull or chest, a brazen shoot-to-kill mission? Consider, Col, how a beard is constructed. It hangs from the chin and chops, doesn’t it, so if someone is firing from below, as in this instance, he might want the shot to go up under the beard, through the neck to the brain. Instead, because he’s stewed and not in a proper stance for firing with a pistol, the round is slightly off and takes the beard in error – takes the beard more than once, apparently, he’s so blotto. The journalist refers to “rips”, not merely “a rip”.’
‘Probably repairs could be done whether the damage was to the beard, the head or the chest,’ Harpur said. ‘I’m not certain it makes any difference. We’re talking about paper wounds in a paper picture.’
Iles laughed loudly, tolerantly, almost affectionately, for a while, as if this were the sort of moronic answer he’d anticipate from Harpur, or idiots like Harpur; but the ACC would be generous and forgiving, as ever. ‘The gunfire had an objective, Col. It was to show contempt for Ralph, for the club and for Ralph’s efforts to improve the club. All right, we can all recognize that his efforts are loony. The Monty is a hell-hole and will remain a hell-hole. But he will not, cannot, see it like that. He’s going to hang pictures there – proper, rated, framed, costly pictures, not some cut-outs from a mag. This is why I say mad large-mindedness, demented grandeur, fractured nobility. And this obnoxious jerk turns up, possibly offended by what he would regard as the over-refinement of the Blakeian motif already installed, and wants to put finale bullets into the head or chest, not the merely affixed beard, of someone who has become a kind of legendary ally in Ralph’s wholesome, ramshackle endeavour. Maybe Gordon Loam hates anyone who aims to improve his social status because it reminds him of how far his own lot have slumped. Contumely, Col. I can find no more suitable term.’
‘You’re known for picking the right one of them, sir.’
‘What?’
‘Terms.’
Lately, Iles had reverted to the close-cut hair style often favoured by Jean Gabin, the French actor he’d seen and admired in old films on the movie channels. He rubbed his palm slowly over the grey tufts two or three times now. Harpur had realized a while ago that this was compensation: he couldn’t allow himself many mirror views of the barbering because it would entail, also, sight of his Adam’s apple, so he went for the tactile, safely away from the looking glass. ‘I imagine we’d describe the tone of this gossip column as de haut en bas, wouldn’t we, Harpur?’ he asked.
‘Most probably.’
‘Something from a high point, where Mr or Ms “I Spy” is positioned, looking down to a low point where Ralph and The Monty are. Piss-taking, Col. Sustained satire. Unpleasant hoots. Contempt. Think of Swift’s Modest Proposal or Pope’s Dunciad. That insidious description of a Bloody Mary, for instance.’
‘Oh? I found it reasonably accurate, sir.’
Iles struck the side of his head mildly with the plump stub of his right hand to signal despair at Harpur’s continued thickness. ‘Certainly, Col. But isn’t it this very accuracy that turns it into a savage tease, claws-out?’
‘Right. How?’
‘The Bloody Mary, as detailed here, is, as you truly say, exactly, classically, right – vodka, tomato juice, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, ice. It represents in that strict form a club bar operating perfectly. But,
of course, during the episode we’re discussing, the Worcestershire sauce doesn’t get to be a standard part of that attractive drink. Instead, in its lone, maverick, fly-by-night activity, it comes to represent the shambolic, deeply disordered conditions at The Monty, the sauce being now on an airborne attack. Also on the attack are sharp, strafing missiles from the broken bottle. This aftermath to The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell outrage brings collateral damage to club equipment and a possibly prized garment. It would have been pretty much the same if one of the bullets had hit a bottle of blackcurrant for rum and black. We are talking of utter social breakdown. It happened on Ralph’s consecrated, potentially elite, ground. This is why I said he would have to retaliate. Pride. Repute.’
‘We don’t know there were bullets. “I Spy” didn’t say so, might even have been careful not to say so.’
Oh, God.’ Iles seemed about to give himself another meaningful, impatient thump, but stopped his hand halfway to his temple, as though he’d decided a second performance would be corny. ‘Of course there were bullets, Harpur. We have someone – Basil Gordon Loam, as obliquely named in “I Spy” – walking around on our patch with a loaded weapon aboard and ready to fire it in a public place regardless of the peril caused. There are some illegality factors, I think, aren’t there, Harpur? Perhaps you see now what I mean by balance.’
‘Balance?’
‘May I give you an easy to follow narrative, Col? Somebody – Gordon Loam – shoots up The Monty, trashing this dismal prole palace in his ex-upper-crust, arrogant, flamboyant style. Ex-upper-crusts are usually a fraction more haughty and Hunnish than current upper-crusts: there’s a violent, subconscious nostalgia element. But the owner sees the club as holy and set to become even holier through his magic. He feels justified in shooting back at a suitable time later; in fact, he feels honour compels him to shoot back, or, of course, to do it by knife or garrotte wire. He’s unable to pretend – either to himself or to others – that the onslaught on Blake did not much matter because only a beard was ruined, temporarily ruined. He refuses to regard this as sottish waggery. He knows there’s nothing only about beards. That particular beard has ramifications. Don’t you understand this, Col?’