Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon

by Ted Lewis

  Down below, Peter cries out in triumph.

  “How about that?” he says. “Who wins the glass ash-tray, then?”

  But his self-congratulation is short lived because Wally appears at the balustrade and, still two handed, points the shooter in the direction of Peter’s voice; and if D’Antoni had lost his grip on rational thought, Wally’s present state of mind makes D’Antoni seem as lucid as Norman Vincent Peale. He looks like Karloff’s stand-in as he hangs over the balustrade, homing in on Peter.

  “You cunts,” Wally screams. “Look what you done.”

  “Leave it out, Wally,” Peter says. “What you on about?”

  Wally answers by pulling the trigger. The bullet screams off the floor and up over Peter’s head. Peter dances backwards like Jagger in reverse. From behind the fish, Con says to Peter:

  “Dodge out of it in a different direction, will you?”

  Peter ignores Con and joins him behind the tail fin.

  “Fuck off,” Con says. “There ain’t enough room.”

  “All of you,” Wally screams. “You all done it, you cunts.”

  Wally hauls three or four off in the direction of the fish. Shrapnel-like scales ripple off the plate glass.

  “For fuck’s sake, Peter,” Con says, holding down his hat.

  “All of you,” Wally screams, twisting round in my direction. “All of you.”

  He lets one go at me, but again, I’ve seen it coming, and by the time the bullet’s in the plaster, I’ve made it to the bottom of the stairs and am well on my way to joining Peter and Con where they are, which is approximately half way up the fish’s arse. This must be the perfect end to a perfect holiday.

  “Here,” Con says. “Find your own fucking hole.”

  Wally steps over Audrey, negotiates D’Antoni’s body, and starts down the stairs, his steps as measured as Gloria Swanson’s in Sunset Boulevard only he doesn’t have Von Stroheim to tell him what to do. The only thing that’s straight about Wally is the direction of his shooter, which is pointing directly at the fish. He hauls off another shot, and more fish scatters to the four corners of the hall.

  “Peter,” Con says. “For fuck’s sake. You got the shooter.”

  “You what?” Peter says, like he’s a mesmerised gay at Judy Garland’s Palladium performance.

  “You,” Wally screams. “All of you. All of my life!”

  Another shot. More shrapnel. Peter rises up from behind the fin.

  “Wally,” he says. “You got to leave this out.”

  Wally says: “You, you fucking poof. Yeah, you first.”

  Wally takes aim, but Peter, looking more sorrowful than angry, fires his shooter twice. One in the neck, one in the eye. For a second or two, Wally remains upright, then he just crumbles, like a demolished chimney.

  For a while after that, the hall is silent, the whole villa is silent, except for the dribbling of the ornamental fish.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I HAND THE FINAL drink to Peter. He takes it out onto the patio, to join Con and Audrey. Audrey is still naked, but at this stage of the game her state of nakedness is not exactly the highest item of interest on the agenda.

  I follow Peter out into the sunshine. Con is sitting on the lounger, his bulk giving him the appearance of a squatting frog. Audrey is standing by the pool, staring at the mountains. Peter lights a cheroot from the last match in a book of matches and slings the empty book into the still-billowing incinerator.

  After a while Con says: “Well, there you go then.”

  Nobody answers that one.

  “Yes, I agree,” Con says. He raises his glass. “Cheers, Con.”

  Audrey turns round from contemplating the mountains and begins to contemplate me instead.

  “Well,” she says eventually, “you done it good and proper this time.”

  “Oh, yes,” I tell her. “Oh, yes. That one’s all down to me, that one is. I done all those, lying in there. Personal. Only I must be slipping, as I now see I left three other characters out of it what I should not really have overlooked.”

  “You done the one you was told to do in the first place then none of this lot would have happened, would it?”

  I look at her and shake my head.

  “ ’Course, it wouldn’t have anything at all to do with those eggs in London who at present are probably sitting behind their desks writing out their Christmas-card lists, would it?”

  “Yeah, well they’ll be crossing a few names off it this year, won’t they?”

  “Yeah, about that,” I say. “Nobody in the present company intending fulfilling their brief to the letter, would they?” I look at Peter and he looks back and puffs on his cheroot. “Peter?”

  He shrugs.

  “I done my ones,” he says, looking at Con. “Anything else is down to the other half of the act.”

  “Piss off,” Con says.

  “Don’t make any difference to me,” Peter says. “It’s you as got to go back and tell them what you didn’t do.”

  “Piss off,” Con says again.

  “Ah, well,” says Peter, and wanders inside to get himself another drink.

  “Yeah,” Audrey says to me. “About going back. You still planning on doing that?”

  I don’t consider that one worth an answer. Audrey folds her arms and adopts an over-the-garden-wall stance, except that with her being naked and that her tits flop over her forearms like she’s a kid holding an armful of party balloons.

  “Well, in that case,” she says, “I’ll just make sure I’m not about when you get back.”

  “Since when you been frightened of a bit of wind and piss?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Because that’s all there’ll be. As you well know.”

  Peter appears in the window’s opening, clinking the ice in his drink.

  “Apart from all these speculations about the future,” he says, “there’s one thing that has a certain immediacy about it, not to say piquancy.”

  “What’s that?” Audrey says.

  “Well,” Peter says, “it’s normal to have the bouquets with the funeral, but the weather being like it is out here, we’re going to have a different kind of bouquet, if you get my meaning.”

  Audrey looks at me.

  “Well?” she says.

  “Oh, that’s down to me as well, is it?” I ask her. “Seeing of course, as how I had nothing to do with the topping of them.”

  “Precisely,” she says. “Gets back to what you should have done, don’t it?”

  A long silence follows, drifting over the swimming pool like the smoke from the incinerator.

  Eventually Con says:

  “They many more of the Blues downstairs?”

  Audrey says:

  “Racks of them. Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Why?” I ask him.

  Con shrugs.

  “Just wondering. I mean pretty big, that incinerator, ain’t it? I mean, sort of family size, know what I mean?”

  All of us, we all look at Con, who blandly avoids the concerted gaze and unhurriedly carries on pecking at his drink.

  After a while, Audrey says:

  “You know, I’ve got to say this, I really have, seeing as how it’s not often I get to experience something what turns my world upside down, so this is why I’m saying what I’m going to say. Which is that, in the way you always align yourself with whatever policy Jack takes, on the firm, I always used to think you were a bit of a wank, thinking round things, rather than through them. But on the evidence of what you just said, I take all that back. I can see now you been influenced by the wrong people, nothing more. I mean, merely a question of sociology, nothing more nor less. I would like you to know, I take it all back.”

  “Bingo,” Peter says. “The lady in the flanellette draws wins the Wincyette sheets.”

  “Fuck off,” Con says, and continues his glass animal routine with his drink.

  For a while nothing happens.


  Then Peter looks up at the sky, then down at his watch. “Getting on,” he says. “Eighty in the shade, I shouldn’t wonder, in about half an hour’s time.”

  A burst of black smoke issues from the incinerator, gushing upwards into the previous mild greyness, like the cough of a smoker who’s smoked one pack too many.

  Con gets up off the lounger, stretches, like he’s ready for a dip, but at the same time doesn’t care that the last one in’s a fairy.

  “Well,” he says. “I don’t know what you think, but that’s what I think. Further than that I cannot go.”

  “Con,” I say to him, “personally, I find that no small relief to hear that. I would hate to think, from my point of view, that there were other boundaries left to be pushed back, even farther, if you were to set your mind to it.”

  Peter drains his glass and shrugs off his jacket.

  “Fuck the philosophy,” he says. “Do we start now or don’t we?”

  Epilogue

  THE CLUB SMELLS EXACTLY the way it always does; a cross between the inside of a plastic wallet and the inside of a disposable Hoover bag. I press the button to the Penthouse lift and the perfume is intensified in spades. I am delivered to my destination and cross the windowless hall which is occupied only by Terry Malloy. Seated in the reproduction Hepplewhite, he speaks, but does not rise, which would of course be asking too much.

  “They’re in,” he says.

  I nod, not caring to put too fine a point on it.

  “Go through,” says Terry. “They’re in there.”

  I nod again, and press the button to Aladdin’s cave. The scene before me is as a thousand times before. Breakfast trays littering the Swedish surfaces, Gerald looking scruffy in his two-hundred-quid’s-worth, Les looking immaculate in his.

  I don’t have to wait long to judge the tenor of the interview.

  “Well, Jack,” says Gerald, “you done well, then, didn’t you? You really done well for us this time.”

  “Thanks,” I say to him.

  “I mean, don’t matter we can’t never go back there again. That don’t matter, do it? Eighty thousand irretrievable quids’ worth of property, that’s fuck all, is it Jack?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “No,” says Les, “not compared to the squaring money both to their filth and ours.”

  “Of course,” I say to him, “no squaring money due to me, of course.”

  “You what?” Gerald says.

  “Did I hear right?” asks Les.

  “Yes,” I tell him. “You heard very right.”

  Gerald and Les look at each other. Gerald is smiling. Les is not.

  “Come on,” says Gerald. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”

  Les shakes his head.

  “No, he’s not joking,” he says. “The cunt is serious.”

  I nod my head.

  “That’s right,” I say. “For once I agree with you, Les. Too right I’m serious. You dropped me in it and I’d no idea, and you wouldn’t even do that to Sammy the doorman without even discussing the possible outcome.”

  “You’re paid,” Gerald says. “You want Sammy’s wages and piece of mind, or do you want what you’re getting for what you’re doing?”

  “What I don’t like,” I tell them, “is the manner it was done. You don’t have a pair of bollocks between you, so you drop me in the Balearics and leave it to the minor characters to fill me in.”

  “I wish we had,” says Les. “I really wish we had.”

  “Well,” I say to him, “chance would be a fine thing. The upshot is, come what may, I am, as of this moment, freelance. In other words, available for weddings and funerals, open to offers, say, like from the Colemans, as for an instance.”

  “Only if you can get as far as the nearest phone,” Les tells me.

  “Hang on,” says Gerald, “hang about.”

  He lights up the remaining inch of one of his disgusting cigars, then addresses himself to me.

  “You serious, Jack?” he asks.

  I don’t say anything. And neither do they. The silence continues until, behind me, the door of the Penthouse opens, revealing Audrey, looking for all the world as if she’s had a nice quiet few days in Ibiza.

  “Hello,” she says. “Everybody all right, are they?”

  There is another long silence, which is broken by Les about to speak, which is cut short by Gerald jumping in before Les can get the words out.

  “Well now,” says Gerald. “This is nice. All girls together once again.”

  He stands up and walks over to where the drinks are.

  “Nice,” he says. “I’ll get us all a drink and we can all discuss ‘What we did in the Holidays’. I’m sure it’ll be interesting, but not interesting enough to affect a tried and trusted business partnership, eh, Les?”

  Les remains silent.

  “That’s what I thought,” says Gerald, poised by the drinks. “Jack, what you going to have? The usual?”

  Ted Lewis: Making It Real by Nick Triplow

  WHEN TED LEWIS WAS interviewed prior to the UK release of the film Get Carter in February, 1971, the film’s publicist, Brian Doyle, described him as “a classic example of the iron twist in the velvet mug.” He was, Doyle wrote, “a nice guy who writes graphically about nasty guys. And dolls. And thoroughly enjoys doing it.” The writer of Jack’s Return Home, that punchy crime novel written in the twilight of the 1960s, adapted and directed by Mike Hodges as Get Carter, had a predilection for “nasty guys.” He wrote them well, revealing a cast of flawed, sadistic, guilt-ridden, deviant and violent characters in seven crime/noir novels and two equally uncompromising semi-autobiographical novels, beginning with All the Way Home and All the Night Through (1965) and concluding with GBH (1980).

  While Lewis might have gone along with Doyle’s description and its nod to the hard boiled school, his skill was in the creation of a downbeat union between those writers and his own distinct brand of taut, lyrical, British social-realist storytelling. When it worked (Jack’s Return Home/Get Carter, Plender, Billy Rags, The Rabbit, Jack Carter’s Law, GBH), Lewis was a master; a pioneer who explored new territories for genre fiction.

  Why, then, isn’t he more widely appreciated? Partly because his early death at the age of 42 in 1982 denied him the second act and critical re-reading his work demanded. He left little other than his published work and the memories of those who knew him. No formal archive or collections of correspondence exists, only a few pieces written about him for magazines, most in the 1990s, when a laddish cultural resurgence rediscovered Carter and, to a lesser extent, Lewis, as some kind of Brit-bloke icon. His books, with the exception of Get Carter, have been out of print for years.

  In researching for my book about Lewis’s life and work, I have spoken to friends, schoolmates and neighbours, made contact and met with his literary agent, Toby Eady, his family and former colleagues. I have collected scraps of reviews and interviews. By all accounts, Ted Lewis’s was an extraordinary life.

  Lewis was born in the Manchester suburb of Stretford in January, 1940; one of a generation whose consciousness was formed in wartime, defined by absent fathers and an uncertain future. In 1946, the family moved to Barton upon Humber, a small town of some 6,000 inhabitants on the banks of the river Humber, north Lincolnshire. In his first novel, All the Way Home and All the Night Through, Lewis described his home:

  “The plan of the town hasn’t changed much since feudal times. The way of life is easy. Everybody has their problems, people there worry as much as people everywhere else, but the surface effect is one of easiness. The youth of the town protests its dissatisfaction with the confining effect of small town life, but hardly anyone leaves the place.”

  As a child, Lewis contracted rheumatic fever, a debilitating illness whose treatment in a pre-antibiotic age demanded complete bed rest. He spent almost a year away from school, reading books and comics, and drawing constantly. Some days his friends visited and he held court, sitting up in bed. On one
occasion, his dad set up a projector and the boys watched cartoons projected against the bedroom wall.

  Lewis had a lifelong love of film. In the darkened auditorium of The Oxford or The Star, he was captivated by Western epics, B-movies and gangster pictures—the more hard-hitting the better. He revelled in the ruthless unpredictability of Lee Marvin’s Vince Stone (The Big Heat) or Ernest Borgnine as Fatso Judson (From Here to Eternity). He liked how they sadistically crushed weak characters without a second thought.

  Lee Marvin had been Lewis’s favourite actor since a B-movie noir, Shack Out on 101, showed at The Star. He watched it several times, fixating on Marvin’s violent wisecracking short-order cook, Slob, who flipped burgers in a rundown roadhouse on the eponymous Route 101. Resolutely an anti-hero, revealed to be spying for a foreign power, Slob delivers a series of brusque one-liners: “It’s a good job I’m not wired, you could push me around like a vacuum cleaner.” Lewis learned every word of dialogue. He stayed in his seat as the credits rolled, memorising the names of cast and crew. Over the years, an encyclopaedic knowledge of film became part of his everyday patter. He also found it useful for chatting up girls.

  Lewis had a stable home life and a solid group of friends. Girls liked him. He was a slight figure, a useful crosscountry runner; quietly-spoken, blond and good looking. He struggled with the oppressiveness of school and its stiff regime, losing himself in dark moods for days at a time. Interviewed for the Manchester Evening News in 1966, he said, “If you weren’t a machine storing up maths, French, and anything moving away from the arts, they’d frown on you.” Fortunately, he came under the influence of the head of English, Henry Treece—novelist, poet and sometime drinking companion of Dylan Thomas. Treece would depart the traditional English syllabus to read Raymond Chandler in class. He encouraged Lewis to write short stories, which he published in the school magazine. As school came to an end and a “good job”1 beckoned, Treece visited Lewis’s parents, persuading them their son’s best chance of completing his education was at art school, across the river in the city of Kingston upon Hull.