Blaze Away

by Bill James

  ‘To summarize: there’s you, Ralph, and there’s Manse Shale. You provide two stupendously successful firms trading in the recreational commodities, these two firms co-existing peacefully alongside each other without violence, without turf war border disputes, without, in other words, blood on the pavement – not yours, not Manse’s, not uninvolved folk’s caught in crossfire. This is the major reason I believe in legalization of the merchandise: it would lead to a placid, pleasant commercial scene, one fit to bring up our children in, all three of us here today fathers of daughters.

  ‘But what happens to this happy harmony if, for instance, you get slaughtered in a vendetta-type conflict with someone whose antecedents thrived in bulk tea but who is now mere malign dregs? Suddenly, we lack equipoise, because equipoise demands at least two components. Remove one, and in the resulting lurch the city no longer benefits from those powerful, smooth-running, allied firms. It has been changed into a parcel of disputed, contested ground. Invaders believe there is now an open, available region asking to be grabbed; forcibly, if necessary. Then, Manse Shale feels menaced by such greedy, colonizing incomers on a patch immediately abutting his and decides on pre-emptive resistance. Where there was amity and cooperation there is hugger-mugger; where there was light there is pitch; where there was order there is shit.’

  ‘Mr Iles prefers order,’ Harpur said. ‘It’s a little kink of his.’

  More club members arrived. Some, seeing Iles and Harpur there, left at once. Others went into a huddle at the far end of the bar and talked loudly of harmless topics such as the royal family, sport and matchbox collecting. ‘Now, Ralph, tell me about Gordon Loam, also called Enzyme, I believe,’ Iles said. ‘Let’s have done with the historical tea and bring things to the present, to now.’

  ‘Tell you about him in which regard?’ Ralph said.

  ‘The relationship,’ Iles replied.

  ‘What relationship?’

  ‘Or attitude,’ Iles said.

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Yours,’ Iles said.

  ‘He’s a permanent banee, that’s my attitude,’ Ember said. ‘A vandal and a Hun.’

  ‘What Col has to worry about, Ralph, is: here’s a lad with shining forebears, chucked out of The Monty in a public spat and with hurtful, hint-hint Press coverage. He ponders this humiliation. His suffering is increased because he knows that in previous times if his ancestors did any pondering it would have been high-powered, positive and wealth-backed, probably to do with possible purchase of another couple of expensive tea-trade fast clipper ships, called “clippers” because they clipped hours, even days, off the import voyage. Presumably, he has a loaded .38 pistol still on his person, short of only the rounds used against The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, and these perhaps replaced. Harpur frets about you, Ralph. You’re dear to us.’

  ‘We wondered if you’d seen anything of Enzyme since the Worcestershire sauce night, Ralph,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Why should I want to see him?’ Ember replied.

  ‘But he might want to see you,’ Iles said.

  ‘Hardly,’ Ember said.

  ‘I could have Gordon Loam pulled in for possession of a firearm, of course,’ Harpur said. ‘But we’d like to get him for something meatier than that.’

  ‘He might come to apologize,’ Iles said.

  ‘He apologized at the time,’ Ember said. ‘I could not accept that apology and would not now, if it were offered. His barbarism was practised not just against The Monty, myself and William Blake, but against the very character and prestige of this city.’

  ‘A kind of treason?’ Iles asked.

  ‘Betrayal,’ Ember said.

  ‘Or he might have come about your interest in art,’ Iles said. ‘Col tells me Enzyme has links in that realm.’

  ‘Does he?’ Ralph replied.

  ‘The mix of prestige cultural and spiritual values and lavish commercial gain might appeal to him, as with that famous expert and critic a while ago, where he might have favoured his own pocket in some deals he handled for others,’ Harpur said.

  ‘What?’ Iles said. ‘What? Which famous expert and critic? Who have you been talking to, Col? How the hell would you have heard of Bernard Berenson?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about Gordon Loam except that he is an ex-member of the club, for ever ex,’ Ember replied.

  ‘Cast into outer darkness? You’re hard, Ralph,’ Harpur said.

  ‘In the cause of good, decent standards we all have to be, surely,’ Ember said.

  ‘So true, Ralph, so true,’ Iles replied. ‘Unwavering. Adamantine. There are times when I think of The Monty, with its strict moral nature and brilliant scrupulousness, as like a cathedral rather than a mere club, no matter how elite that club might be.’

  Harpur drove again when they returned to headquarters in the unmarked Ford. He felt a kind of respect, even admiration, for Ralph’s entrenched, noble, farcical love of The Monty. Iles had mocked him about this just now. But Harpur knew the ACC, too, regarded Ember with some genuine warmth, and not just because he was crucial to Iles’s strategy for decent civic orderliness. He liked Ralph simply as Ralph. His cooperation in the maintenance of peace came as an extra, though a massive extra: it helped Iles demonstrate that properly controlled toleration of drugs trading could bring big benefits.

  Alongside Harpur, the ACC said: ‘I’ve been giving some thought to the green Peugeot, Col – the woman climbing over urgently from the rear seat, apparently in a frantic hurry to move the car off.’

  ‘And offering the thong-flash?’

  ‘Yes, that woman.’

  ‘Did you recognize it, sir?’

  ‘The Peugeot?’

  ‘The thong.’

  ‘Shall I give you a scenario, Col?’ Iles replied.

  ‘This will be a treat, sir.’

  ‘We move from fact to speculation, but speculation based on fact. It’s known as extrapolation, Col, but don’t you get in a sweat about complicated words. I’m confident you could manage a dictionary and realize things are laid out there alphabetically.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Thuswise then: Ralph stands in The Monty porch, apparently intent on watching someone depart, most probably in a vehicle. I speculate – speculate from his posture, Col—’

  ‘From his body language.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t reduce everything to cliché, Harpur. That all right with you? I speculate from Ralph’s posture that he is taking leave of a visitor for whom he feels no respect or comradeship. The reverse. Vast enmity.’

  ‘Possibly Basil Gordon Loam, you’d say, though Ralph denies this? More or less denies it. Evades the questions.’

  ‘Now, additional but vital, new, raw speculation, Col: the woman in the Peugeot – has she also seen a vehicle depart from the club yard and therefore rushes to get after it, gumshoe it, for some reason?’

  ‘The woman? You consider her as involved?’

  ‘I’m tying two apparently separate events together: the behaviour of Ralph, and the behaviour of the woman, eagerly joining the Shield Terrace traffic.’

  ‘Yes, I think I got that.’

  ‘What I’m creating is termed “a synthesis”, a merging, Harpur. This is the kind of mental process that those with overarching intellects will often exercise. I don’t use that term – overarching – out of crude vanity, Col. It is merely a description. Such people see connections many would miss. They draw together the apparently totally dissimilar. You’ll say, “Like the metaphysical poets’ imagery, such as where John Donne compares a grubby flea-bite to the glories of coitus.”’

  ‘Like the metaphysical poets’ imagery, such as where John Donne compares a grubby flea bite to the glories of coitus,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘It is a flair, and possibly more than a flair.’

  ‘Up your street, sir. I’ve heard people say after meeting you, “That Mr Iles, though, he’s a synthesis man, no question, the sort who can see a fuck and a flea bite as more or less
the same, if we discount the possibility of pregnancy, though not from the flea bite.”’

  ‘Talking of coitus, I ask myself, in the typically relentless, dogged fashion I often use when confronting a problem, what was she doing in the back of the parked car?’ Iles said. ‘This is broad daylight, a.m., on a busy bit of road, pedestrians who might be peeping into the Peugeot, and numerous vehicles passing close. Indecency surely couldn’t be contemplated. So public!’

  ‘Much more obvious than a flea bite,’ Harpur said.

  ‘In any case, there was nobody else in the back, as far as I could see. I suppose he might have rolled down to the floor, attempting concealment, as part of this abrupt change of programme. But wouldn’t I have spotted him, Col?’

  ‘Plus, there’s her thong.’

  ‘In which respect? What’s your point, Harpur?’

  ‘As you can testify, it was still very much in place. That might not have been so if she wasn’t alone in the back but suddenly decided she had to break things off, as it were, and hurry to fix herself on someone’s tail. As I see things, sir, the need to restore a basic piece of clothing would not be a priority then. She could get herself shipshape at her leisure in private later. For the moment we don’t know where that will be.’

  Iles mulled this analysis for some while. Glancing at him in the passenger seat, Harpur saw the Assistant Chief nod a couple of times, clearly impressed by Harpur’s thong logic. Then Iles said: ‘So, we’re mystified as to why she was in the back alone, Col, but maybe that’s not a pressing question. There are several of those: first, who is she; second, who is she tailing; third, why; fourth, what, if any, is her connection with Ralphy?’

  ‘I wondered if she knew a bit about surveillance from a car, sir. She might be a fieldworker for some outfit. A professional pathfinder who’s learned the skills? Maybe she’s even heard that police are trained to use the rear seat of the car sometimes when doing a watch, instead of posing viewable, very blatant and snoopy, in the front. Perhaps she’s had leg-over training in how to get fast from her viewing position to behind the wheel, regardless of normal modesty – the end justifies the flash.’

  ‘You wondered, Col? When, Harpur?’

  ‘While it was happening.’

  ‘You mean you were ahead of me in reading the situation?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, sir.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I felt you were preoccupied. Quite reasonably preoccupied. The Peugeot presented certain unusual activity requiring your full-out attention. This was very much an all-round situation. You took one aspect, me another. I have the Peugeot number.’

  ‘You have the Peugeot number? Where do you have the Peugeot number?’

  ‘In my head, sir. It seemed the obvious thing to do, to remember it. The computer might be able to give us an identity from the reg.’

  ‘It seemed obvious, did it, Col? If it seemed the obvious thing to do, why didn’t I do it? Is that what you’re sodding saying in your roundabout, furtive way, Harpur?’

  ‘Very much a two-man operation, sir. You can’t be expected to do everything.’

  ‘Who can’t expect me to do everything? Why can’t he or she or they expect me to do everything?’

  ‘At that stage – the pre-synthesis stage, before you overarched – we didn’t assume the Peugeot and Ralph in the porch might be linked, sir,’ Harpur replied. ‘We made a double-pronged approach – you with your admittedly special area of interest, I with mine; yours to do with the woman’s brisk, completely-dressed hurdling, mine with clandestine observation techniques.’

  Iles said: ‘She’d read about Ralph in the “I Spy” column. She decides to get down to Shield Terrace and case the club. That’s what a fieldworker might do, isn’t it, if you’re right and she’s a fieldworker? She’d need actuality.’

  ‘It could be that, yes.’

  ‘Thank you, Harpur. To do with art?’

  ‘It could be, yes.’

  ‘Enzyme’s in that kind of game, yes?’

  ‘On the edge.’

  ‘“I Spy” mentions art, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Ralph’s Monty rebirth plan.’

  ‘She to do with art?’

  ‘It could be, yes.’

  ‘Thanks, Harpur. I’ve managed to get you to see clearly.’

  ‘That’s another of your flairs, sir.’

  FIFTEEN

  When those two had left, Ralph went at once into The Monty cloakroom and methodically and with no panicky rush – no Panicking rush – studied himself in a wall mirror. The matter was serious, though not an all-out crisis, at least for now. He would meet it unflinchingly. He saw himself as that kind of man – determined, stalwart, practical – surely the total reverse of Panicking.

  Ralph loved this men’s cloakroom, and it always irritated him badly to hear any member refer to it as ‘the bog’ or ‘the pisshole’. Although he didn’t regard that kind of arrant coarseness as bad enough to deserve a life ban, or even suspension – except on persistent repetition – he’d tell the member very plainly he was out of order, should adopt some decent delicacy and refinement of language, and to watch his fucking gutter gob.

  Before Ralph bought The Monty, it had been a club for local businessmen and professionals – lawyers, university staff, dentists, gambling machine purveyors, journalists, vets, hairdressers, surgeons: the kind of people who would very reasonably feel entitled to proper facilities because they’d never been on Welfare. Ralph knew that most people believed humanity was at its least dignified when using this kind of depot for one or more bodily discharges, and therefore, to compensate, he felt the location should be brilliant and touched by overt prestige. The magnificent male cloakroom was a clincher when Ralph had wondered whether or not to buy the club. He kept it in the same state as the previous proprietors had created, accepting this as a precious obligation.

  The cloakroom was large, well lit, spotless, the five cubicles with glinting push-button flushes – the buttons as large and handsome as two-pound coins, a kind of proclamation about the importance of hygiene; bright shining metal paper-holders in the cubicles, always adequately stocked with arse-friendly wipes; plus elegant mahogany doors. The radiantly white urinals had very substantial high sides, like angels’ wings, Ralph thought, to ensure considerable dick privacy for those who wanted it. Ralph also thought he detected a pride element in the plump, marble smoothness of their construction. It was as if the urinals declared, ‘We are urinals, content, and more than content, with this designation, and not to be mistaken for anything but urinals.’ He didn’t ever hang about long with this fancy: a talking urinal must be near the top limit of as ifness.

  Although Ralph abhorred crude slang in speaking of the cloakroom, he regarded the Americans as stupidly squeamish about such things. ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ Michael Corleone says in The Godfather. Go where? Have you got your shower hat? He’s in Louis’ restaurant, for God’s sake, with two men he’s going to shoot dead, using a gun secretly hidden behind the lavatory cistern for him. A restaurant might supply a gun. It wouldn’t supply a bath. Ralph couldn’t remember even seeing a washbasin. And then there was that Woody Allen film where the sister of the man he’s playing finds she has agency-dated a relieve-himself pervert. Explaining, she says, ‘He went to the bathroom over me.’ Such daintiness! Yet Americans invented the term ‘motherfucker’ because ‘fucker’ had come to be regarded as tepid. That brand of contrast tickled Ralph, made him wonder at the oddities in language and in the human beings who used it. He often went in for wide thoughts about the nature of existence.

  In the middle of The Monty’s cloakroom floor was a battery of hangers on a metal frame set around a radiator for drying out raincoats when necessary. Not many present Monty members used the hangers because of theft or wilful wrecking and abuse of a hated colleague’s garment; but Ralph kept the sets of hooks for when he had improved the club’s aura and membership quality. He would bet that in, say, The Athenaeum club,
Pall Mall, London, they didn’t have many instances of members’ topcoats getting chiv-shredded in the cloakroom and/or their pockets stuffed with dead tabby kittens; and it was a club like The Athenaeum that Ralph dearly wanted as model for the new Monty.

  Despite this kind of problem, Ralph considered the club cloakroom to be an ideal area for someone wishing to do some careful, confidential scrutiny of his features in a big, clear looking-glass: somewhere he’d read that the term ‘looking-glass’ had more class than ‘mirror’, and he preferred this when describing his own, vital and extremely well-justified sessions in front of it. He did listen carefully for any approaching footsteps, though. He wouldn’t want to be seen like this, apparently obsessively self-focused, sort of ego fixated. He could imagine the demeaning, malicious gossip that might go around:

  ‘I found Ralph in an act of sacred worship at his own holy altar.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Monty crapper.’

  ‘Sacredly worshipping who?’

  ‘Ralph.’

  Wrong. Utterly wrong. Utterly cruel. But nobody could know the real reason for Ralph’s fierce, immediate need to check on the eminent integrity of his face. It incensed him that Iles had compared his appearance to a woman’s – that woman waiting at the seashore for the French lieutenant. This wasn’t just a woman, but a woman abandoned, desolated, crushed. Of course, Iles probably knew the suggestion would shatter Ralph, ruin his self-esteem; it was why slimy Iles concocted it. Most likely he didn’t really believe Ember resembled that pathetic figure. But Iles was the sort who’d doggedly search his brutal mind for a remark aimed to give maximum, enduring pain, and he’d find one, no question. He kept a hoard of them, perhaps alphabetically filed, poised to be called on, and added to daily as he dreamed up and polished more abuse.

  Ember had considered pointing out quietly yet forcefully to Iles that many people – intelligent, unbiased people – saw a similarity not between Ralph’s looks and those of a blighted, hopeless woman staring out into nowhere, but with Charlton Heston’s, the late major Hollywood star’s, when at his career peak as a hero in epic film roles: Ben-Hur, El Cid, Moses. Ember had known something poisonous would come from Iles when he asked if Ralph wanted to hear about the supposed degrading, cross-gender likeness he’d noticed. Naturally, Ralph said at once he did not want to hear. And, also naturally, Iles ignored the reply. He ignored anything that didn’t suit him, and plenty didn’t suit him. What suited him were items as malevolent as he was, and the world could supply only a limited number of these.