The Golden Pig

by Jonathan Penny Mark Penny

  “Well gentlemen, any last requests? A cigarette perhaps? Some new office furniture, Mr Goldman?” Levity somehow didn’t suit Lau, he was too pompous.

  “How about some prawn balls with P.Lau rice?” quipped Hymie, who felt somehow liberated by having nothing left to lose but his life.

  Lau scowled. He was on the point of signalling for the headsman when he checked himself and an evil leer spread across his normally inscrutable face.

  “What do you hope to gain from this, Chopstick features?” snapped Hymie in a final flash of defiance.

  “You are simply the bait gentlemen, for the Diva of Death.”

  “You want Steffanie Scarlatti? Is that it? I can tell you where she lives.”

  “I fear it is too late, Mr Goldman.”

  His prophetic words died on his lips as, looking up, he finally caught sight of a glint of light in the tree cover on the horizon.

  “VAVAVOOOOMMM!!!!”

  Lau stood pointing at the trees with his mouth open, but all anyone could hear was the roar of a high speed projectile as it blasted across the sky, locked on its target. The third van of the trio burst into flames, its petrol tank exploded sending black smoke up into the ozone layer. Within a few minutes all that remained of Ford’s finest was a charred remnant.

  “Try selling that on ebay!” snarled Scarlatti.

  Hymie gazed across the cliff top. Funny, he didn’t recall seeing a burial mound there before. Well, it was burning away nicely now.

  “It’s that ruddy woman again, let’s get outta here fast, Mike!”

  Lau focused his binoculars on what looked like a dancing shrub. Scarlatti was desperately hopping around trying to avoid the flames created by the blowback from the AT gun. Their eyes met across the field of battle.

  She discarded the cumbersome metal pipe and unstrapped her beloved handgun; a modified Colt 1911, from its holster. “Come and get it while it’s hot boys!” she shouted above the noise of the holocaust.

  The Lau pro-celebrity synchronized hit-team was nothing if not ambitious. From all directions they broke cover and ran at the crazy bitch. Unfortunately for them she had a weapon and knew how to use it.

  Gunfire rang out across the land.

  “BLAM, BLAM-BLAM, BLAM-BLAM, BLAM, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!!”

  The cliff-top was beginning to resemble Boot Hill.

  The man who said ‘he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword’ has been dead for many years. He was killed by a runaway horse. No-one uses swords these days except as ornamental letter-openers, apart from psychotic Triad hit-men with a hankering for the glory days of the Samurai. So it will surely come as no surprise that the outcome of the first innings was Swords nil, Guns and Rockets, eight. There was no second innings.

  It was while Mike and Hymie were contemplating how irksome it could be to be lying face down in a pile of rabbit droppings that the Seventh Cavalry rode over the hill in the shape of D.I. Decca and a Police Armed-Response unit. The cavalcade of cop cars paraded out along the cliff-top and police marksmen were deployed to cover their entrance onto the field of battle. The area was duly cordoned off and most of the survivors apprehended for questioning. Master Lau, however, was not among those detained.

  As the sun climbed over the wreckage of his Zebaguchi 650, Hymie gazed forlornly into middle distance, tears of regret welling in his eyes. He approached the colossal wreck with an aching void in his heart. It was foolish to love a car, and yet, why not? In this veil of tears called life, what made more sense; to put one’s trust in man, with all his fickleness and deceit or in a machine that gave long and lasting service? He stood and surveyed the ruins of his car with a feeling of total desolation. What was left for him now?

  “Don’t get too close, Goldman! It’s only a car.” shouted Decca.

  “Only a car ?! Do you understand nothing, you crass commercial oaf?! It was the last of its kind. The last Zebaguchi 650 anywhere in the country. What would you know anyway, you…you Mondeo driver!”

  Sometimes there were just no words.

  “That’s enough bullshit for one day, Goldman. You’re under arrest for causing an affray.” Decca smiled. Some days you couldn’t help liking this job.

  Part Eighteen

  “I don’t know. How many times do I have to tell you?” pleaded Hymie.

  “As many as it takes Goldman.”

  He was in a police cell late at night.

  “Oof! Uurgh! Aaargh!”

  He was spitting out blood and teeth, but Terse continued to hit him. This couldn’t be right, this couldn’t be happening, it was an outrage.

  “You can’t do this! This is England, we have the rule of law, we have rights.”

  “If everyone has rights then no-one does!” cried Terse, and then punched him to the ground again.

  “You did it, didn’t you? You’re scum. I know your sort and you did it alright.”

  Hymie’s mouth opened in an involuntary shriek, seeming to last forever. He was looking through the eyes of Eddie Munch, down on the Oslo fjord sinking into an apocalyptic orange sky, feeling all the existential angst of his race. This couldn’t be real, he was from Finchley.

  He woke up, sweat pouring down his face.

  ‘What the hell am I mixed up in?’ thought Hymie. ‘It’s getting so bad that I can’t sleep without Class B drugs and Class A nightmares.”

  He was back at 792A Finchley Road, lying on the floor. He sat up and lit a cigarette. He hated himself for his weaknesses but they were a part of him; he might just as well have loathed himself for breathing. Even his solicitor had been surprised when they let him out on bail. Benny had advanced him the bail money against the insurance proceeds from the Zebaguchi 650, although he wasn’t entirely sure he had paid the premiums, or even that it was registered in his name. Possession was nine tenths of the law.

  Finally, as the icing on the cake, he had persuaded the judge to let him pay off his parking fines at the heady rate of £2 a week. Judges didn’t live in the real world, so Mr Justice Williamson probably thought he was driving a hard bargain!

  Mike had been released with a caution; not to associate with Hymie Goldman, and been bound over to keep the peace for twelve months.

  Hymie picked up the newspaper he had been using as a blanket and re-read the lead story. Under “Beachy Head Horror!” it gave a somewhat skewed account of the events, focusing on the stunningly attractive chief suspect, Steffanie Scarlatti.

  There were pictures of her in a state of semi-undress looking like Miss Whiplash in a black basque with what could have been a black riding crop. They had to be fakes; the photos that is.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t have the figure for it, just that she didn’t seem to care enough about the money to let them take the snaps. As usual he was wrong; money was always in fashion with La Scarlatti, so much so that she had sold topless photos of herself to numerous top-shelf publications while the cult of her celebrity still burned bright. Now languishing in Holloway prison awaiting trial, Steffie Scarlatti had become something of a media celeb.

  Master Lau was a name no-one was mentioning. Hymie was firmly of the belief that this was because no-one - in the Police or elsewhere - had ever heard of him, rather than because, unlike Scarlatti, he lacked a shapely pair of breasts.

  Sergeant Terse had been transferred to traffic duties after the Beachy Head Horror. The view from the top was that the casualties would have been significantly lower without his involvement and that a spell in Traffic would calm him down. This at least was the view before Monday 23 August or “Black Monday” as it was afterwards known in Traffic circles.

  The day commenced as dismally as most Monday mornings, with hordes of Vectra-bound reps and MPV-mums on school runs tooting and fist-waving at each other in the age-old ritual of the rush-hour traffic-jam. Fate, however, was about to play a hand in events.

  At 08:00, Sergeant Terse and P.C. Reidy were proceeding along The Broadway, Hendon, in a westerly direction. At 08:06 their attention was cau
ght by the “Plink! Plink!!” sound of an expensive computerized traffic-signalling system going for a Burton.

  Sergeant Terse turned to his junior colleague and said “Oh, dearie me, Reidy, we had better conduct the traffic until such time as the engineers can be called for.” To which P.C. Reidy replied “Yes Sarge. I’ll go and call for assistance at once.”

  With the general air of a master conductor assuming charge of a forty piece orchestra Terse strode out into the path of the oncoming vehicles, narrowly avoiding death or serious injury. He raised the baton in his right hand and miraculously the traffic all around him stood still. He smirked.

  At this point he appeared to drastically overestimate his own skills and starting waving the baton around with wild and enthusiastic abandon as though about to launch into a high-speed rendition of the William Tell Overture. The traffic moved forwards in all directions simultaneously and pandemonium ensued; screeching brakes, colliding cars and everywhere the sound of breaking glass, metal and plastic.

  BANG! CRUNCH!! TINKLE TINKLE!!! KERRRUNCH!!!!

  Row upon row of assorted vehicles now cluttered up the street in all directions like some giant discarded metal concertina. At this point Terse became more introspective.

  “Oi, P.C. Plod!” cried a distressed motorist.

  “Sergeant, thank you!”

  “Sorry… Oi, Sergeant Plod! What are you going to do about my ruddy car? It’s completely knackered!”

  “Get that pile of junk out of here lady, before I arrest you for kerb-crawling!”

  He looked around for signs of Reidy and reinforcements, but finding none, quickly removed his helmet and started to walk off down the street.

  “Oi, Pig, where do you think you’re going?” asked a passing yobbo.

  Sergeant Terse was about to claim to be going off duty when he caught sight of the huge biker blocking his path and thought better of it.

  “You’re nicked, Scumball!” he snapped.

  The Dudley Road Chapter of the Walsall Sixty-Niners had spent weeks cleaning and polishing the chrome on their choppers and tuning their engines to the peak of perfection. They had planned to spend a jolly weekend of mayhem and carnage in Brighton before returning home after tea on Sunday. Being stuck in a pile-up in Hendon had never been part of their plans and their feelings towards the man responsible bordered on the homicidal. Terse neither knew, nor cared.

  Mitch Maguire, their leader, weighed in at 22 stones in his stockinged feet, not that he ever wore stockings; there was nothing funny about him. At six feet six inches he towered over Terse and stood glowering at the poor specimen of a policeman before him as though disappointed that his country had come so low. He needn’t have worried.

  Terse pulled back his right fist and straightway plunged it into the man-mountain’s massive gut. He doubled up, as much with surprise at the other’s temerity as with pain, then recovered and landed a blow on Terse’s left ear. They traded punches for a few minutes until the sergeant realized that without back up he was on a hiding to nothing and the biker realized that spending the rest of the week in a police cell wouldn’t go down too well with the missus.

  Maguire climbed back onto his chopper and started to rev-up the engine.

  VVVVRRRoooommmm, vvrrooom!!

  Terse caught sight of P.C. Reidy ambling along the pavement in his general direction, whistling a happy tune. He hoped that meant that help was on its way, otherwise it was just him and Reidy, and Reidy was about as much use as a fart in a spacesuit.

  Terse presented his open palm to the approaching biker.

  “Come off it Fatso, even you couldn’t be that daft. You so much as scuff my shoes and you’ll be on the wrong end of a charge sheet as long as your arm.”

  Maguire’s face displayed a complete lack of concern as he revved-up his bike once more, before finally releasing the hand brake. The chopper lunged forward menacingly, threatening to flatten Terse where he stood, but the bloody-minded copper maintained his absurd composure. Like some bizarre suburban matador he span on his right heel, lurching out of the path of the chromium-plated killing machine.

  Terse looked on with an air of smug satisfaction as the hairy biker flew hell-for-leather through his vacated airspace, maintained his trajectory with sylph-like grace for several seconds and then ploughed headlong into an approaching articulator.

  The crunch of breaking bones and mangled motorbike parts could be heard streets away.

  “Call an ambulance, Reidy!”

  Reidy arrived at his destination just in time to see the denouement and as instructed promptly radioed for medical assistance.

  “They’ll never get through the traffic, Reidy, we’d better carry him to the hospital!”

  “You’re never going to move him in that state, Sarge?”

  “No, but he doesn’t know that, Reidy,” he said, with a sardonic smile.

  It was at this juncture that the rest of the Sixty-Niners decided that they would never live it down if they sat idly by and let a copper get the better of their leader.

  “Oi, Pig! Like to try that again with the six of us?”

  They dismounted and the six leather-clad nutters marched as one towards Terse, swinging their ugly-looking bike chains about like heavy metal jewellery.

  “We’re gonna re-arrange your face, Scumball!”

  This was something Terse could understand. The Road Traffic Acts failed to grab his attention. The Highway Code was apt to pall over the long haul, but give him a bunch of plug-uglies with chains and he was on home ground. He unfastened his truncheon.

  “Boys, boys, give me a break.”

  “Where do you want it, Pig? Arm, leg or head?”

  “I’ve got my quota of dumb-ass thugs for this month. Do you really want to join Giant Haystacks over there on C Ward? Just put down the necklaces while you can still walk!”

  It was pure chance that Inspector Ray Decca should be on duty and passing down The Broadway at the time all this was going down. Certainly he had little chance of avoiding being re-united with his former sergeant.

  Once he knew why he had been sitting in his car for the past hour; while a sergeant in the Traffic Division had a punch up with a gang of bikers, he reflected that it could only really have been Barry Terse and that the man’s innate aggression would out.

  Terse belonged in Homicide; whether as a statistic or a detective he wasn’t entirely sure, but the truth would out.

  “Hold it there, gents!” said D.I. Decca.

  It was difficult to say who was the more surprised: Terse, at the sudden re-appearance of his former boss, or the bikers at being referred to as ‘gents’.

  “Keep your nose out, Goldilocks, or we’ll re-arrange your face too!” said the most eloquent of the Neanderthals to Decca.

  “It’s okay Chief, everything’s under control,” said Barry Terse.

  “That’s one way of looking at it, Sergeant.”

  “I’ve called for backup, sir.”

  “Thanks, Reidy,” said Decca.

  The penny dropped with the bikers. “Hey! Goldilocks is a Pig too!”

  Their difficulty seemed to be in knowing which policeman to hit first. Terse was in his element; stylishly unwinding a bike chain from around his neck with his left hand while executing a perfect polo swing with his truncheon hand.

  “OOOF!”