Guns of Brixton

by Paul D. Brazill

  ‘Well, I’m still alive and kicking, eh?’ said Kenny. ‘Just about, anyway.’

  Marty and Kenny started to wrap Bert Kwok in a sheet of green tarpaulin.

  ‘We should get a discount on this stuff, the amount we’re going through lately,’ said Kenny, grinning weakly.

  Marty just grunted and looked at the geisha girl sat in the corner smoking a joint. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It was an accident,’ she said in a strong Scottish accent. ’I divvin know my own strength, do I?’

  ‘That’ll be all that porridge and Irn Bru, Tina, won’t it?’ said Kenny. The geisha girl glared at him.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Marty.

  They took the body out to a dark alley at the rear of The Blue Lagoon and opened the boot of Marty’s burgundy coloured Bentley. The rain poured down in sheets. The alleyway was dark. The only light came from the stained glass windows of the Methodist church next door. Loud heavy rock music pounded away.

  ‘What the bollocks is that?’ said Kenny, with a gasp.

  ‘Oh, they’ve converted the church into some sort of heavy rock venue. Much to the chagrin of Uncle Tony, of course, who thinks it’s a form of sacrilege.’

  ‘What does Father Tim think about it?’

  ‘Oh, he gets in there now and again, to be honest. If there’s nothing decent on the telly.’

  They picked up Bert Kwok’s body and threw it into the boot of the Bentley.

  ‘I still don’t get why Bert was into all that geisha stuff,’ said Kenny. ‘He wasn’t even Japanese, was he? His old gran was from Hong Kong, his dad was a Welshman – Gary Dobbs, the bloke that won Mastermind three times over. And Bert himself was born in Ealing.’

  ‘Nowt as queer as folk, as they say up north,’ said Marty.

  ‘Do they?’ said Kenny. ‘I wouldn’t know about that. I’ve never been any good with foreign languages.’

  Marty slammed the boot shut.

  ‘Fancy a pint after this, Marty?’ said Kenny, sweating. Marty looked at his watch.

  ‘No best not. Veronica will lose the plot if I stay at work all day. It’ll be another dose of self-help bollocks.’ He started to get into the car.

  Tony’s silhouette appeared in the doorway, reminding Marty of John Wayne at the end of The Searchers.

  ‘Foul night, Uncle Tony,’ said Marty, picking up a black umbrella from the back of the car.

  ‘It’s the night that the Lord saw fit to grant us,’ said Tony with a scowl. He walked up and down, squeezing the rubber stress ball that he’d bought after his first heart attack. The doctor said that it would help with his anger management. It didn’t particularly seem to be doing the trick.

  ‘You can manage on your own with that, can’t you? Eh, Marty,’ said Tony.

  ‘Well, I suppose that Anarchy Al can give me a hand at the scrapyard, as long as he’s not too stoned.’

  ‘It was a rhetorical question,’ growled Tony. ‘I need Kenny to stay with me.’

  Kenny shrugged. ‘Anything I can do to ...’

  ‘SHUT IT!’ bellowed Tony, his voice echoing.

  ‘Ron Moody has opened the briefcase and you are in very deep do dah indeed.’

  SIXTEEN

  Kenny vividly remembered the first time he’d clapped eyes on Ron Burke, who was more commonly known as Ron Moody because of his association with stolen goods. It was sometime towards at the fag end of the sixties, when things were dangling more than swinging. Kenny had recently managed to come into possession of a collection of rare coins from Claudette Godard, a glamorous French film starlet who had confiscated them as part of a divorce settlement from an apparently famous film director that Kenny had never heard of. An unofficial settlement, of course. Kenny had known Claudette years before when she went by the name of Barbara Shannon and worked as a waitress in one of the Dean Street coffee houses near the dirty book shop he was managing. She was a pretty tasty purse snatcher, too.

  He’d arranged to meet her at The Regal Club in the depths of the still sleazy Soho. The Cook Brothers had bought The Regal from Camp Henry McGee, after he’d been encouraged to make a quick getaway to the Costa Del Crime, and it was a regular meeting place for ‘clandestine carryings on’, as Tony Cook used to say.

  The Cook Brothers also inherited The Regal Club’s repertoire too, unfortunately. Kenny and Claudette were enduring the last breaths of a fading American torch singer who was at least as drunk as the group of high court judges sat at a table close to the stage. They were chattering away and making cracks about her singing, how much she sounded like a glugging blocked sink, when Ron appeared out of the shadows like something from a Hammer Horror film. He was completely bald; in fact, he didn’t even have eyebrows, and he wore tinted glasses with lenses as thick as jam-jar bottoms. He was pretty damned dapper looking, though, Kenny had to admit. He wore a well-cut, black, three piece suit and he carried a black cane which had a tiny hip flask in its skull shaped handle. Claudette seemed to shiver as he kissed her hand and said: ‘Enchanted.’

  Amazingly, he looked pretty much the same now as he had then. He hadn’t seemed to have aged a bit and Kenny wondered if maybe he really was a vampire after all.

  ‘Okay, bugger off with the stuff that Kenny brought, Ron,’ said Tony passing the holdall over. ‘And I’ll see you at Chapford Races at the weekend. Alright?’

  ‘You wish is my command, Tony,’ said Ron, finishing his Bloody Mary.

  Tony turned back to Kenny. He looked stressed as he sank down onto his barstool.

  ‘Right. So, now, I suppose I’d better fill you in.’ He clamped a hand on Kenny’s shoulder. ‘But not in the way I was going to,’ said Tony.

  Kenny breathed a sigh of relief.

  ***

  Anarchy Al really did look every inch the acid frazzled 1960’s relic that he was. He was a beardy-weirdy mixture of Fidel Castro and Charles Manson, complete with a Chairman Mao cap but without the swastika on the forehead. And he was dressed, as was his wont, head to toe in red.

  Al had earned the nickname The Red Raider from the days when he was a hunt saboteur. He used to turn up at hunts riding a red Norton motorcycle, wearing red leathers and a red crash helmet with devil’s horns attached. Those days were long gone now, although he was still heavily involved in animal rights and still kept up the look.

  The metal cabin where Al and Marty were sat was also red. On the walls were photographs of bridges that Al had taken – all were pretty much identical to Marty’s eyes but bridge spotting was another of Al’s more quirky obsessions.

  ‘A fuck it list?’ said Al, scratching his beard with his long fingernails.

  ‘No, a bucket list,’ said Marty. ‘It’s a list of things that you’d do if you knew you only had six months to live.’

  ‘Shagging a young bird, parachute jumping, climbing the pyramids and the like?’ asked Al, handing Marty a jumbo sized spliff.

  ‘That’s the sort of thing,’ said Marty. He took a hit from the spliff and looked around the room.

  ‘Yeah, there was a Jack Nicholson film, I think. Might have seen it. Why? You’ve not got the big C, have you?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. But, you know, missed opportunities and the like, eh?’

  ‘Who knows where the time goes,’ said Al.

  Al picked up an acoustic guitar and picked out the melody of a Richard and Linda Thompson tune. He didn’t use a plectrum because his right hand had long, curly fingernails.

  ‘Fingernails are getting pretty long, Al,’ said Marty.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll cut them tomorrow and put them with the others.’

  When Al’s finger nails got to a certain length, he liked to cut them and keep them in a glass case, with a date next to them. It grossed Marty out.

  ‘You know, there are those who consider you a tad mental, Al?’ said Marty.

  Al gave a Cheshire cat grin.

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ he said.

  He took the spliff from Marty and passed him the guitar.

 
; ‘No, thanks, mate, I haven’t played the old banjo for donkey’s years.’

  ‘I always found it strange that you never kept up the guitar playing. You were talented, just like your dad.’

  ‘Just one of those things, I suppose. Like in that John Lennon song, life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans, eh?’

  ‘Well, you’re one of the cats that have got the chops, Marty. Unlike your Tim, who has Van Gogh’s ear for music.’

  As Al played, Marty just drifted off and started trawling through the memories of his last trip to Spain. The peace and quiet. The weather. The chilled out attitude. He really was getting tired of the family business and wished that maybe he could do something else. Veronica’s suggestion that they move to Spain and open a bar, with him providing live music, was becoming increasingly more attractive.

  ***

  After her siesta, it took Monika a moment to adjust to the surroundings; the room looked unfamiliar in the wan light. She’d lived in a lot of anonymous looking flats over the past few years.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Pamela, switching on a bedside lamp. ‘You were shouting in your sleep again.’

  ‘I thought I’d heard whistling outside my window, and someone calling my name. But I was having that dream again,’ said Monika. ‘The same old one.’

  ‘The one where Pawel gets out of prison and comes to London looking for you?’ said Pamela, in a sticky South American accent.

  ‘As always,’ said Monika. She ran her fingers across the coin shaped scar on her right shoulder and grimaced at the memory it brought back.

  Monika sat up, tied back her long black hair and checked the gun that she kept hidden under her pillow. She got up and walked over to the window. Someone was kicking a tin can down Waterloo Road. Richard & Babs’ Key-Bab Shop across the street was brightly lit up and a couple of hoody wearing youths were stood in the doorway shuffling around.

  An old fat man in a Santa Claus suit was pissing against a wheelie bin with a kebab in his hand. And he was singing: ‘Last Xmas/ I Gave You My Arse/ And The Very Next Day/ You Said You Were Gay’.

  Monika laughed. ‘The famous English sense of humour,’ said Pamela, putting her arms around Monika.

  Monika frowned. ‘Reminds me of when I first met Pawel.’

  ‘You never told me how that happened,’ said Pamela.

  Monika sat back down on the corner of the bed.

  ‘Oh, I was a real … country bumpkin when I moved from Zielona Gora to Warszawa. From the green mountains to the big gray city. I was just fresh meat, really. I still remember arriving just after midnight and the central train station seemed big, smelly and scary with the drunks staggering around looking like the zombies in Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ video. As soon as I got outside I got into a taxi.’

  Her memory of the night was vivid.

  ‘The cab raced off at full speed and I was thrown back in my seat. And it was then that I was reminded of the stories about ‘The Night Drivers’.’

  ‘Who are ‘The Night Drivers’?’ said Pamela. ‘They sound scary.’

  ‘Well, ‘The Night Drivers’ were young men pumped up with amphetamine. Every midnight they tied fishing wire around their necks, and their cars’ brakes. And then they raced from one end of Warsaw to the next without stopping. Jumping red lights. When I saw the cut marks on the taxi driver’s neck and his red eyes I’d been afraid. But as we chatted away I thought that Pawel, the taxi driver, was funny. He turned up the music. It was Monty Python’s ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’. He said that he loved the English sense of humour and I said me too. We chatted about Mr Bean, On The Buses and the one with Mrs Bouquet until we arrived at my new accommodation in Praga.’

  ‘And that was how it started?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Monika. ‘It seems like another world. Another life.’

  She stood up. ‘I may as well have a shower,’ she said, walking into the bathroom. ‘I’m working for a couple of hours tonight and after that we are going to do a little shopping, remember?’

  Pamela lay back on the bed and switched on the radio. ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’ was just ending.

  ‘Our theme song,’ said Monika, and they both burst out laughing.

  ‘But maybe we could do with a little help tomorrow morning,’ said Monika. ‘And I think I have just the right person in mind.’

  THE LAST GANG IN TOWN

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘It’s a long story, Kenny,’ said Tony, opening up a packet of dry roasted peanuts. ‘As long and as convoluted as one of those stories that Ronnie Corbett used to tell when he sat in that big armchair. But I’ll try and give you the abridged version.’

  Kenny said nothing. He was just glad that Tony had calmed down. He was particularly glad to have changed out of the dress, too. He’d borrowed a tux from one of the bouncers and it was as tight a Yorkshire man in a five star hotel but he felt at least a little less of a plonker than he had.

  They were sat at the bar in The Blue Lagoon. It wasn’t particularly crowded, just a handful of American tourists wearing silver fezes and the odd twitchy weirdo on their own. A tall brunette with a turn in her eye, wearing a cowboy outfit and cut-off jeans so tight you could read her lips, was pouring them drinks. Onstage, a blonde covered in gold paint danced listlessly to the James Bond theme, her gun barrel used in ways that were making the handful of punters both shaken and stirred.

  ‘Now, a lot of people, when you mention the fifties to them, well, they’ll talk about ‘Rock Around The Clock’, Teddy Boys, James Dean and the like. But, as you well know, Kenny, for many of people, like me and my bruv Terry, it was a time of entrepreneurial endeavours.’ Tony finished his drink and waved over the barmaid from the other end of the bar.

  ‘You had the Richardsons south of the river, nasty pieces of work, they were. In the East End were The Nutty Boys, as we called them, The Kray Twins, over Whitechapel way. Then there was that old Queen Camp Henry in Soho, working with the Maltesers. But in this manor, West London, from Munster to Barnes, it was The Cook Gang. We ruled the roost. We were kings of the hill.’ He sipped his drink. ‘When did you join our merry band, Kenny?’

  ‘A couple of years after I came out of National Service. At the start of the sixties,’ said Kenny.

  ‘Ah, yes. You were one of the second wave. But we were all ex-squaddies, bursting with testosterone, mind you. Young dumb and full of cum, as they say these days. We were well established by then, though. But at the start there was just Terry and I and a motley crew of guttersnipes that we knew from school or borstal. Including Big Jim, our absent friend, of course. Not much use and even less of an ornament but he served his purpose, now and again. God rest his soul.’

  They clinked glasses.

  ‘To Big Jim,’ they both said.

  ‘Yes, The Cook Gang was, to paraphrase Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that great cesspool into which the flotsam and jetsam of life were inevitably drawn,’ said Tony.

  ‘Aye, see what you mean,’ said Kenny, clearly confused.

  ‘We were a mish-mash of odds and sods, Kenny,’ said Tony. ‘There was Tuc, the bloke who’d received his nickname after the time he’d tattooed a dotted line and the word ‘cut’ around his neck using a mirror.’

  ‘I remember him,’ said Kenny, laughing. ‘Whatever happened to him?’

  ‘Oh, he pissed off up north a while back. Lives that town where the hung the monkey because they thought it was a Frenchman.’

  ‘Easy enough mistake to make, I suppose. Tuc should fit right in there.’

  ‘Indeed. There was Rip-Off Olly Robinson, the best pickpocket in the smoke. He’s apparently teaching English in Colombia, for some reason I’ve yet to fathom.’

  Kenny made a loud sniffing noise.

  ‘Yes, you may well be right. He was a bit of a walking pharmaceutical experiment. There was Duke Wayne in his cowboy gear and Colt 45s, remember him?’

  ‘Worked as a stuntman on Carry On Cowboy and got run over by
Sid James? Walked with a limp ever since?’

  ‘That’s the bloke. And, of course, we couldn’t forget Bilko Sanderson, who had more than a few anger management problems that usually needed to be addressed. Yes, we were a rough and tumble bunch of odds and sods. Ram raiding, armed blags, protection, petty theft, blackmail, dirty magazines, slot machines. We covered a lot of bases.’

  The barmaid poured another round of drinks and winked at Kenny. Or maybe Tony. Kenny couldn’t really tell.

  ‘Leave the bottle, Christine,’ said Tony. ‘Which is how we managed to set up our little empire. And we were lucky too. We greased the right palms and made the right connections so we didn’t do any serious time. Well, except for Bilko Sanderson. And that wasn’t even his fault. It was all down to Big Jim. God bless him.’

  They raised their glasses in another toast.

  ‘That was the cripple car incident, wasn’t it?’ said Kenny, starting to relax.

  Tony grimaced.

  ‘Well we do say physically challenged these days but yes that was the incident in question. Big Jim stole a Robin Reliant to use as a getaway car after Bilko had robbed a post office in Romford. And of course, as luck would have it, a well keen young copper picked them up on their way back into the city.’

  ‘And Bilko did ten years?’

  ‘More. Unfortunately, the judge at his trial was Judge Mackenzie, known as Dirty Mack because of his penchant for frequenting various Soho strip joints. Mack was in the Kray Twins’ pocket and they were a trifle pissed off about the robbery being on their manor. So, old Mackenzie sent Bilko down the Swansea River.’

  ‘Wales? But Bilko went to Durham nick, didn’t he?’

  ‘Indeed, he did. I was attempting to be humorous, Kenny. And I clearly failed. But yes, Bilko ended up in the frozen wastelands of the north. Poor bastard went in when Elvis was king at the top of the charts and came out to Glam rock and Queen. But he did his bit, kept out of trouble and didn’t grass anyone up. When he got out, he retired and opened up a couple of boozers south of the river.’