I would stop in a shop and buy something more suitable so I could move about with a bit more speed and much less style. Of course it was Sunday in August 1973, and the shops were all shuttered and in darkness so I had to think outside the box. I walked across to the park and found a group of loutish skateboarders. I purchased some quite new and very sweat-stained American basketball boots off a big taciturn mono symbolic boy who didn’t have the appearance of a businessman, but when it came to negotiation, he was good! His business style was to grunt in non-comprehension every time I made an offer. He carried on grunting until the amount of money got ridiculous. Without a word he removed his star-spangled boots and took my money, enough to buy three good pairs. A least now I could run if I had to. I had a sneaking suspicion these sweaty objects would need wings! They had a definite need for a thorough fumigation. They stank like French cheese on a hot day, but beggars can’t be choosers!
“You can wear these,” I said, giving the boy my handmade leather-soled loafers.
“Grandad shoes! I’ll give ‘em to mi old man,” he mumbled. At least he could speak. I thought he might have been disabled. I suppose skateboarding in leather-soled loafers he was!
I hoped my sister would now be back at home on the farm. I prayed that I wouldn’t bump into the aunties. The slow jog to the farm was three and a half miles in baseball boots and a suit. I think my body smelt worse than the pigs when I arrived.
On the way I’d stopped at another phone box and contacted the farm. I was lucky George answer the phone. “Where’s Jane? I need to speak to her,” I’d asked.
He didn’t know but had a good idea and would try to find out for me before I got there. To avoid the watchful and often vengeful eyes of my aunties he would meet me at the gateway to the main road in half an hour.
“I phoned the vet and he suggested Jane was visiting friends at the Red Wheel cafe up on the bypass,” George informed me. This greasy cafe was a usual Sunday stop for the guys after thrashing out a hundred or so miles around the valleys in the morning. Jane hadn’t been out today. The veterinary emergency with the chinchilla continued, spoiling her day off.
My brother had phoned the cafe, and Jane was going to wait there for me. I would have to make my own way to the Red Wheel because George had told the aunties he was nipping out to look at some livestock for ten minutes. So George for all his farm management degree wasn’t in charge of the day-to-day running of his own life. He may have controlled the farm animals but that’s where any semblance of control ended, the two wily old vixens were holding him by the balls.
I knew in the eyes of the aunties George was still the wicked nine-year-old boy who liked mint imperials a little bit too much. He once felt the full wrath of Auntie Beattie after dipping into a bag of imperials without permission. The wicked old witch must have counted every single mint.
The Red Wheel cafe was another three mile hike, so as soon as I was on the main road through town I stuck my thumb out to attempt the impossible, hitching a lift. To my great surprise I could hear a car stopping before I’d even turned round, and to my even greater consternation it was a large 3.5 L Rover coupe. A grinning John Smith looked out wagging his finger in a “you’re a naughty boy” gesture. He pulled the Rover into reverse and backed up about one hundred yards. I continued to stride out walking towards the Red Wheel pretending I hadn’t noticed anything. John Smith idled along behind me, wanting me to suffer. On a personal level I just think he was having a laugh. It was John Smith after all. I know the town well and made for into a pedestrian alleyway. I didn’t want him knowing where I was going. I’d slipped clear of the thug, or was it my one-time best friend?
The Red Wheel cafe sometimes looked a magical place with bright red and white outside lights flooding the car park. Shabby motorbikes glowed in the twilight of a day under this coloured illumination. Sometimes the whole car park glitters with chrome, and holds an oily odorous mechanical magic about it. Not today, however. It was a grey summer’s day and the place look like shit. Inside on the cigarette burnt plastic floor a scarred jukebox was playing some Buddy Holly rubbish from some time in history, ancient history.
The whole cafe was ancient history. The plastic tables, the plastic chairs, the chrome-backed chairs at the bar, the Wurlitzer Jukebox, not the mighty bubble Wurlitzer, but a 1960 something crappy one built in Mexico for a price. The worst feature in that grease filled emporium of fatty foods and bad music was a constant low lying blue cloud of cigarette smoke. For somebody like me, a farm boy, this was choking on a good day. On a bad evening this cancerous fog burned your eyes making you cry. In fact the whole scene in there made me cry.
All this was interlaced with a smell of oil and fried food. I don’t mean cooking oil I mean engine oil which oozed from those bloody marvels of modern transport rusting in the car park. They squirted more oil out of their old engines and fumes from the exhausts than heavy goods vehicles. Everyone seemed to have a layer of light oil on their lower legs and boots, girls included. Smoking full strength cigarettes without filters seemed to be the cool thing to do, and for some of them this would end their lives quicker than their dangerous motorbike riding.
I could see Jane near the back along with Steve, who, despite his slimness, tattoos, greasy blonde hair and general leather clad nastiness, was a very well-educated civil engineer. On weekends he became Marlon Brando’s “Johnny” from the movie The Wild One. This was the hard image Steve put across. He was a really nice guy behind the front, but with me being younger, allergic to grease and totally uninterested in any form of transport that didn’t have seats, I was a pariah. From this standpoint I painted him with the same brush as everybody else, the stereotype brush giving broad strokes. All black dogs are dangerous aren’t they?
Jane nodded to me in acknowledgement of my arrival pointing to a quiet table in a smoky distant corner where nobody sat because it was next to the toilets. Without asking she stopped on the way across to order Pepsi Cola for me and another hideously frothy espresso for her. Lucky for me our table was in the corner furthest away from the not so mighty Wurlitzer. It was one noisy bastard with rattling blown speakers. We could just hear ourselves while nobody else could.
The topic of our conversation was an exploration of what Jane knew. I, of course, didn’t know what to ask and she might know something important but not think it vital. You can’t answer if you don’t know the question. I was starting to despair at the mask of disbelief coming down over people’s faces when you informed them you couldn’t remember anything from more than a few hours ago.
Everything back beyond that over bright Saturday morning for two years was a blank. It sounded preposterous even to me and I was suffering this living hell. What had I done to deserve this? Perhaps I didn’t want to know the answer. My preoccupation was this memory problem might be physiological and something inside my head was slowly leaking. Soon the dam would burst and I’d die in seconds with the last moments of life full of unbearable head pains. But the fact remained, no matter what the cause, I was clueless.
“So, go on, little brother, what’s the problem now?” Before I could reply she continued, “Before you say anything I do know you’ve talked with George. He’s told me everything. You’d better not tell me lies, you little shit, or Steve will come over and…” She looked me straight in the eyes. I wasn’t getting a word in and she placed a hand on my lips to hold me silent and continued. “If you really can’t remember you’ve been working for those bloody gangsters we’d better get to the bottom of what they want from you pretty smartish, or you’re in shit street!” Jane was straight to the point.
The conversation continued in this direction for some time, three Pepsi Colas, three frothy coffees, and at least an hour and a half of discussion, not wasted but not very informative. Jane knew why Harry the Pocket was called Harry the Pocket. She would tell me later. My sister also knew about Sam because she’d seen me out and about in my car with her. She was curious as to what I was doing with my girlfr
iend’s mother. I couldn’t answer.
“I saw you a few weeks ago parked up at the reservoir. All the windows were misted up. You were shagging her, weren’t you?” Jane stared me down waiting for the look of guilt, waiting for colour to come into my face. She was to be disappointed and at the same time not disappointed. This was some thin veil of proof to Jane that I really was telling the truth. I knew nothing about a romantic visit to a reservoir car park. I think Jane was starting to believe.
She knew about my house, centre of town, a small two up two down with little front garden and a back yard leading into an alleyway. “Not a bad little spot,” she said. She also knew I’d had it modernised and it had a kitchen with a bathroom built above on the back. I was shocked to the core when she started to fully explain my dubious career. Jane knew I’d been dealing with hallucinogenic drugs and marijuana, but she didn’t have a clue as to where I would hide anything, though she made an aggressive suggestion. Quite unpleasant!
She explained on the occasions we’d met up in the last two years she’d wasted her time trying to persuade me that I was being an idiot, leading a lifestyle that would lead me to prison or death at the hands of the very man I’m now trying to appease. Jane couldn’t suggest what to do in my current situation. She did, however, suggest it was time I thought about getting out of the shitty business.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the townhouse?”
“You only asked about the flat,” Jane replied, looking at me straight in the eye.
“You were testing me? You thought I was conning you?”
“Yes!” Jane grabbed my hand bending my little finger hard back. It hurt like hell.
“What the hell!”
“Just a taste of what liars get!” Jane had made her point.
I took a sip of Jane’s coffee and it was disgusting. I decided I needed to know more about one of my dangerous anniversaries.
“Tell me about Harry Graves. What’s this pocket thing?”
Jane outlined Harry the Pockets secret past and what a vile dangerous unscrupulous man he was behind the facade of “businessman”. She’d learned Harry’s secrets from her best friend Louise Wilson, a trainee doctor, Rachel’s daughter and sister of my former best friend Bob.
We lived in such a small nepotistic community where everyone thought they knew everyone else’s darkest secrets. They certainly didn’t know mine! Louise told my sister the shocking story after her mother Rachel suffered a hysterical rant about Harry Graves who wasn’t Harry Graves at all. It all started when Louisa casually mentioned she knew Harry and his wife Miriam from the surgery where she worked during her studies.
Rachel had screamed at her, “You stupid girl! You should never help the rzezimieszek! He is evil, pure evil! He deserves to be ill and die!”
“The reservoir or whatever you said needs to be ill?” Louise was trying to lighten the mood.
“The rzezimieszek, the rzezimieszek!” Her daughter couldn’t understand the Polish, so Rachel screamed it out in English. “The pickpocket, the cutthroat, that’s what everybody called him in his camp. He wasn’t in my camp, thank God!”
Harry the Pocket had a tattoo which consisted entirely of numbers under is left armpit. He first met Louise’s parents, the future Mr and Mrs Wilson, in an American army field hospital. The man who would become Harry the Pocket was already called rzezimieszek along with accusations and rumours concerning his treachery. Harry had a Polish name, Rzezricki, which he now hoped was totally forgotten. He wouldn’t want anybody remembering him from the old days. He grew into the accusative nickname the rzezimieszek during dark days when he used any means to further his ends. A name spawned in the cruel blood-soaked winter earth of a faraway Poland.
How Harry Graves came across his sombre English name no one knows. It’s not even close in sentiment to his Polish name. In the current world Harry spends a lot of time talking of money in the pocket, keeping it away from the government, his percentage, and hamming it up with a continuous habit of putting his hands in the famous pockets and gesturing to all this is where his percentage should go. He continuously hams it up over his nickname probably in a subconscious effort to shift the truth of its origins. No one, absolutely no one, was allowed to even think about mentioning his nickname, it had a bleak history.
Rachel had been told by some local survivors that Harry (Rzezricki) arrived in the concentration camps late in the war. He was the son of a wealthy jeweller, and with careful spending and even more assiduous hiding he’d managed to avoid the Nazis for more than four years. However, in the autumn of 1944, the net finally closed in around Harry. Rumour was he tried to escape by implicating the innocent people in a flat below. Two of the soldiers shot a family in the kitchen, pushing the bodies from the window to fall into the street as an example to others. Harry was promised a visit to the gas chamber and did not escape.
The rumours had been rife about the Nazis hoarding gold and precious stones, so when they marched filth covered Harry directly to the showers from the train he made a final plea to a senior SS officer who beat him to the floor with his silver handled stick. Before he was unconscious Harry managed to scream out that he was the best jewellery expert in Poland. He could sort and value confiscated family heirlooms. He was very good at book work. He didn’t die in the showers but awoke on a dirt covered floor in a crowded hut. He was alive! This had saved him for a few days.
To survive he made himself more valuable. Harry needed an edge to keep him alive, so he told the Nazis he was capable of finding all the hiding places in the camp, places where prisoners hid their precious belongings to barter for meagre scraps of food. He’d keep his eyes and ears open, and at the right moment would reveal where some of the more careful Jewish people kept their wealth. He also knew people hiding anything unapproved in the camps received a bullet to the back of the head, or were beaten to death in front of the others as an example.
In the final days of war, Harry used his influence and hidden wealth creamed off from his informing to hire four of the late arrivals. These Jewish men still had enough strength to fight. He promised he could keep them alive with his contacts and camp knowledge until the Americans arrived.
Tanks rumbled in the far distance, and daily retreating Germans marching past the camp in bedraggled convoys. Chaos reigned when the showers had stopped killing, the ovens had gone cold, and the guards were fleeing to avoid being slaughtered by enraged Allied soldiers.
Harry was crippled by fear after two of his “helpers” were found mutilated without throats, and the other two helpers disappeared as if they’d never existed.
Apparently a tough American sergeant was openly in tears as he described the scene after he’d opened a very thick gas tight door. He explained to the others he could hear a pathetic whimpering sound, the only noise in all that quiet horror. The hardened veteran couldn’t believe somebody so brave had managed to survive all this horror. He’d plucked this man so close to death out from inside a mound of rotting corpses. The man was now being cared for and sent to the field hospital. All the others knew this man was the rzezimieszek and the truth of why he was hiding.
Many knew that he’d hidden among the rotting corpses of the very people he betrayed to prevent others hunting him down and killing him like a rabid dog.
In the American field hospital more rumours started, some of the survivors knew of Harry, and called him the rzezimieszek! Some of the stronger ones wanted to kill him, but to their annoyance the Americans cited it all as rumour and protected Harry. They moved him one hundred miles to another field hospital. This is where for a short time he made friends with Abraham and Rachel. They were soon to shun Harry because the truth was hunting him down. Others at the hospital already knew Harry only too well. A few days later they moved him again for his own safety.
The rzezimieszek reinvented himself as Harry Graves, friendly businessman and local antiques dealer, as a cloak of protection shrouding him against his purulent past.
Eventual
ly the rumours found him in a northern town in England. Other survivors lived in this community, people with tattoos, who would like to kill him even now, their rage against him testimony enough. Harry stays very private in all things. Unguarded public appearances even seven hundred miles and twenty-eight years from his old home were a rare occasion. Rachel and Abraham arrived in that small northern town five years after Harry. They had rare glimpses and never acknowledged him.
So I knew why I couldn’t call Harry “the pocket” to his face. And if I ever did I think I might end up another victim. The cold dark room with a concrete floor would probably be his basement, or someplace he rented. I wondered if I could use this information with the authorities to get out of the situation; grass up Harry to get time off. When I thought about it I was sure that other survivors would have reported him already, but what can the authorities do, all the evidence was dead.
The conversation continued with the obvious next question. If I owned a house, where was it? My sister told me the address. I knew the street, very quiet and out of the way.
“The ideal place to host wild parties, and do a bit of business with pleasure, why not?” Jane said, all the while staring hard into my eyes looking for a clue. I said nothing.
“That’s how you described it to me last year!” Jane’s spat the words.
She thought I was losing my mind because I’d been experimenting with the muck I sell. Now I was reaping the rewards of my decadent criminal lifestyle. She was not surprised I was suffering, nor that I had people after me. In fact she told me she was surprised I lasted this long in the business.
“All bad news, all villains your so-called circle of friends!”
The biggest surprise was who I actually worked for. I thought it was the notorious Harry, but no, I worked directly for Lenny the Helmet who I seemed to think was now doing the accounts for the businessman. John Smith worked directly for John Smith, and for neither of the other parties. It was all getting very confusing until my sister explained that I’d been taken under Lenny’s wing after his accident during Christmas 1971. He could walk but he found it easier to use a wheelchair.
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