Smiling Willie and the Tiger

by John Harris

  Mace decided that he might enjoy working with the inspector after all. At least he sounded efficient. His idea of capturing the payroll robbers wasn’t to take part in a raid on a brothel but for the first time he was being offered real help and it was no time to carp.

  ‘I have a party of twenty-five men at Sinai,’ he said. ‘I can put them at your disposal.’

  ‘Might be useful,’ Berkeley said. Despite his compliance, however, he had no intention of allowing Mace the kudos from any capture that was made. ‘There are four roads out of town,’ he went on, ‘I suggest you put a party on each of ’em ready to ambush anything that slips through our fingers.’ He had been prepared for protests but Mace was quite indifferent to who got the credit. All he wanted was the joy of revenge.

  ‘I’m quite agreeable,’ he said.

  Berkeley’s eyebrows rose. He hadn’t expected such reasonableness.

  ‘Well, we’d better get down to it,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve got a little business to settle.’

  Three

  But even as Mace and Berkeley got down to planning, other events were in train. Willie Herbillon was calling an extraordinary general meeting of the shareholders of the Great Payroll Robbery Company.

  As he had appeared in the kitchen at Poll’s that morning, Poll had been looking worried. Her bright hair was wrapped in a silk scarf to hide the curl papers she still wore, and with her make-up still on her face from the night before, she looked jaded and smudged.

  ‘Look worried,’ Willie had said, picking at the carcass of a cold chicken.

  ‘Yes.’ She frowned. ‘I’ve got a smart party coming off.’

  ‘You’re a smart party yourself, Poll,’ Willie grinned, slapping her behind.

  ‘Leave off, saucy!’ She brushed him aside. ‘I’ve got all I can handle with the front of the place on Christmas Eve. People’ll be in town from every dorp for miles around, and all them fellers from the diggings wanting a good time. Most of em’ll be three sheets in the wind and I can’t be in half a dozen places at once. I’ve got a concert in the billiard room as well – magician, minstrels, the lot – and this party upstairs in Number Twelve. A big feller from Kimberley.’

  ‘Josias can look after ’em.’

  ‘You know what Kaffirs are.’ Poll frowned. ‘The cham’ll be warm and they’ll get their thumbs in the soup. And since that fight the other night I daren’t have trouble in front. That blasted inspector warned me he’d close the place if it happened again.’

  She smiled impulsively. ‘Keep an eye on Josias for me, Willie,’ she said. ‘There’s a good boy. There’ll be three of ’em, so make sure they stay sober and don’t drop anything. And make sure there’s enough candles and the cloth’s a new one with no holes in it for things to fall through. You can help yourself to cham.’

  Willie was intrigued. ‘Who are they, Poll?’ he asked.

  ‘IDB.’

  Willie choked as part of the parson’s nose went down the wrong way. ‘Shouldn’t say things like that, Poll,’ he said. ‘IDB’s illegal.’

  Poll studied him for a moment. ‘So’s a lot of things,’ she said shrewdly. ‘But nobody knows and its just a feller with a few klips to sell and a couple of local fellers come to look ’em over.’

  When she’d gone, Willie sat on the stoep in the sunshine, whistling thoughtfully to himself, then he walked upstairs to where Josias, the black head waiter, and his two assistants were clearing away the debris from a party of the previous night. He talked to them for a while, then he visited the kitchen and helped himself to more cold chicken and a glass of soda water. Still thoughtful, he studied the back stoep and the yard, and the lane that led round to Nieuwoudt Street. Finally he walked up the street to the shabby room he was sharing with Fish, examined what was left of Nagel’s property baskets and make-up box, then walked back to Poll’s to talk to the porter, Joby.

  ‘Find Baas Tiger for me,’ he said. ‘And Baas Fish. Tell ’em I’d like to see ’em in the Standard Bar down the road.’

  When they arrived, Willie had inevitably found the piano. It was old and a few notes were missing but he had a large Rhynbende by his elbow and was singing cheerfully.

  ‘Oh, I heard the screams of the dying,

  As I rifled their petty cash…’

  He greeted them with a smile, swallowed his drink and offered cigarettes round as they settled themselves. They were all looking a little shabby again. Christmas was due in a few days’ time and the prospects looked bleak from the point of view of celebrations.

  ‘Time we got down to business,’ Willie said.

  The Tiger stared at him gloomily. ‘What business?’ he asked.

  Willie beamed. Though the smile wasn’t worth anything intrinsically, at least it warmed the day. ‘Diamonds,’ he said.

  Immediately, their listlessness vanished. The Tiger pushed back his chair.

  ‘I’ve had enough of diamonds,’ he said.

  Willie pulled him into his chair again. ‘Tiger, old chap, you’ve got the soul of a pile of sand.’

  The Tiger paused and sat down again but his lashes were going like wasps’ wings now. ‘You can end up on the breakwater at Cape Town if you muck about with diamonds,’ he pointed out. ‘People don’t like their diamonds being pinched. They keep ’em well locked up and if they lose ’em they yell for the police, you bet.’

  ‘These won’t be locked up,’ Willie said. ‘And they won’t yell for the police. They’ll not dare. They’re IDB.’

  ‘Honest?’ Fish looked interested. ‘Where’d you hear this?’

  ‘Poll. Coming on Christmas Eve. Upstairs in Number Twelve. Three waiters to look after ’em. Josias and the Indians Tipu and David.’ Willie beamed. ‘Three waiters,’ he said. ‘Three of us. What’s easier?’

  The Tiger was smiling, too, by this time. ‘Nagel’s property baskets,’ he said. ‘The Massacre at Cawnpore.’

  ‘The very same. Frock-coat, white gloves and Nana Sahib hats.’

  ‘And all blacked up from the make-up box. They’ll never know the difference in candlelight. Who goes in and gives the signal?’

  They let the flies decide and it turned out to be the Tiger.

  ‘We’ll want your gun, Poser,’ Willie said.

  Fish grinned.

  ‘Empty,’ Willie added firmly and his face fell.

  ‘What about after?’ the Tiger said. ‘Getting away.’

  Willie gestured. ‘Always a bowl of lard in the kitchen. Have it outside under the stoep. Get rid of the make-up with it, chuck the clothes away and nip round Kiewiet Lane into Nieuwoudt Street. When we walk in the front door – long before the fellers upstairs get out and come down looking for their diamonds – we’ll be white men again.’

  It was a plan of alarming simplicity and the Tiger stared at Willie admiringly. He had to admit it at last. He was a rogue. There was no point in fighting it any longer. ‘Soon be Christmas,’ he said gaily.

  Soon be Christmas, Mace told himself bitterly. A few more days. He could hardly sit still until it arrived because it was proving extraordinarily difficult to pass on his instructions to Instant. He obviously couldn’t go into Poll’s after him and Instant seemed remarkably loath to come out. A feeling of disillusionment was setting in and he felt he could trust nobody.

  It was 23 December before Instant finally turned up at the little tented camp at Sinai, sleek, well fed and smug, albeit a little ruffled. He had been happily drinking in Winifred when Prinsloo had passed through on his way home with his waggons to spend Christmas in the bosom of his family.

  ‘They’re still there,’ he announced as he appeared in Mace’s office.

  ‘I know damn well they’re still there,’ Mace snapped. ‘Until Christmas Eve. After that, God willing, the swine’ll be in the cells.’

  Instant smiled. ‘We move in on Christmas Eve, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mace was so excited by the coming raid he forgot to be angry with Instant and began to explain the plans he’d made with Berkeley. />
  ‘I shall be outside,’ he said. ‘Police officers will be concealed among the houses opposite and at the rear. There will be no escape.’

  Instant grinned. ‘What about the lads, sir? They’ll want to be in on this. This is the reason why they didn’t get on the boat home.’

  ‘They are being employed as a second line of defence,’ Mace said.

  ‘A second line of what, sir?’

  ‘A second line of defence.’

  ‘Is the war going to start again, sir?’

  Mace frowned, rightly suspecting sarcasm. ‘They will be waiting on the roads out of town in case by the slightest chance any of these swine get through the police cordon. They’ll halt anyone who heads for the veldt.’

  Instant nodded approvingly. ‘Sounds all right, sir,’ he said. ‘But what if these fellers object?’

  ‘Our people will have orders to fire if necessary.’

  ‘To kill, sir?’

  Mace nodded, his eyes gleaming. ‘I want those men,’ he said. ‘They have assaulted members of His Majesty’s Forces more than once in the person of you and me, Instant. Especially me. That’s a crime against the State. If possible they will be brought in alive. If not, they will be brought in damn well dead.’

  Instant went cold. He hadn’t joined the army to go shooting at people.

  ‘We have twenty-odd men in addition to you and me, Instant,’ Mace went on. ‘And there are four roads out of Winifred. One to Standerton where they can catch the train to the Cape. One to Paradise on the Bloemfontein road. One to Ochs Drift on the Johannesburg road. And one straight out into Bechuanaland and the desert.’

  ‘Which nobody in ’is senses would take without making proper arrangements.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Mace nodded. ‘I shall therefore place three men there, in the charge of Corporal Pattinson. Corporal Markson and five men will be on the Bloemfontein road. Corporal MacFiggins, the roughrider, and five men will watch the Jo’burg road.’

  ‘’Ow about the Standerton road, sir? That’s the one they’ll take, I reckon. To catch the train that goes through at midnight to the Cape.’

  ‘Exactly what I thought,’ Mace said approvingly. ‘You will be waiting there with the rest of the men.’

  ‘Makes sense, sir,’ Instant said briskly.

  Mace smiled. ‘With the police, we shall be deploying over a hundred men between us. If they can get past that lot they deserve a job with Houdini.’

  A thought occurred to Instant. They seemed to have forgotten one vital factor.

  ‘What about Wooden, sir?’

  Mace smiled. ‘Wooden will be as far as possible from where I shall be,’ he said. ‘And where he can be kept well under control. You will have him with you.’

  ‘On the Standerton road, sir?’

  ‘I can’t think of any better place.’

  Instant could. If he’d had his way, he’d have slapped Wooden on a trumped-up charge of drunkenness and locked him in the cells until the operation was over. As far as he could see, with Wooden involved, the whole bloody thing hung in the balance.

  Four

  Christmas Eve. Again! Only eight days off 1902.

  The wind had dropped and the day was airless, and by the time Mace slipped from the midday train at Winifred the town was like an oven. The sun seemed to sizzle in the bright hard sky, throwing every shadow up with diamond-like sharpness. The corrugated iron roofs and the slates on the new brick buildings shimmered in the heat and the railway lines north sent up wavy lines of heat before they disappeared into watery pools of mirage. The tar between the newly laid wooden blocks in Nieuwoudt Street oozed upwards and collected in little raised puddles.

  The Kaffirs hanging about the station and near the four hotels and outside the bars in the hope of tips were drowsy in the sun; the white men inside, affected by the celebrations which had started soon after breakfast in an overflow of enthusiasm, were already torpid or noisy according to their natures and the way liquor affected them.

  On this Christmas Eve – the first since the war had ended – everyone seemed determined to put everything they’d got into celebrating and by lunchtime, when Mace went discreetly to the Masonic Hotel to eat a quiet lunch, a man in the bar was pounding the piano and roaring ‘Slap, Bang, Here We Go Again!’ To Mace,’ priggish in his sense of what was right and what was wrong, it was like the ante-chamber of hell and he sat straight-backed and stiff-faced as men staggered from the bar and headed homewards to sleep off their drink in time to start again in the evening.

  Following the shaded sidewalk on his way to the police station, he paused for a moment by Nel’s Emporium to light a cigarette. Poll’s, across the road, looked much the same as it always had, but he could see the porter hanging paper decorations in the porch, while a few Chinese lanterns had been put up among the trees to make the place look festive.

  Glancing about him, he saw that every alleyway and door could be stopped against flight. He couldn’t see how the plan could go wrong. Not with the whole of Berkeley’s force involved. And, surely, he thought, the Lord God of Hosts wouldn’t do it across him yet again.

  As the morning progressed into afternoon, Instant placed his men. Every dusty road out of Winifred was covered and, with the veldt a mass of thorn bushes, cactus, aloes and scrub, to say nothing of stones, anthills and meerkat holes, no one in his senses would chance a headlong flight across country in darkness.

  ‘So if they come at you up the road,’ he instructed his men, ‘you fire! If we get these bastards this time, you can all go ’ome.’

  Only Wooden – inevitably Wooden – found it difficult to absorb the simple instructions.

  ‘All you’ve got to do is sit on your fat arse,’ Instant said indignantly. ‘It don’t sound ’ard.’

  ‘But ’ow will we know it’s them,’ Wooden objected. ‘It’ll be dark.’

  Instant stared at him with disgust. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, man! People won’t be riding round the bloody veldt at that time of night. They’ll be home in bed with their wives – or some other feller’s wife. And if they ’aven’t wives and kids, and mebbe if they ’ave, they’ll be at Poll’s concert or blind drunk in one of the bars. That about covers the ’ole activities of Winifred, so if anybody’s out here, he ’adn’t ought to be. I shall be down the road there where it bends by them rocks. I’ll be in the trees and if they try to turn round, I shall be waiting to assault them in rear.’ He paused, wondering if he’d thought of everything because he and Mace had been keeping things so secret they were having to spy on each other to find anything out. ‘There might be one. There might be two. There might be three. If it’s one or two it might be anybody, so be careful. If it’s three there’ll be no doubt.’

  Wooden’s beady yellow eyes burned as his small mind laboriously churned over the facts.

  ‘You will therefore command ’em to ’alt,’ Instant went on.

  ‘“Friend or foe?”’

  ‘The war’s over, you bloody fool! You will command them to ’alt. If they do not ’alt, you will raise your weapons and bring down the ’orse.’

  ‘Suppose they’re coming at us full shocking tilt?’

  ‘Suppose they do?’ Instant flared. ‘Christ, if six of you can’t bring down a target as big as a ’orse then it’s God ’elp the British Empire! But perhaps that’s why it took so bloody long to win the war.’

  In the police office Mace was introduced to Berkeley’s sub-inspectors and sergeants and the granite-faced woman detective from Johannesburg. Her name was Ada Buiderkamp and she was like a house-side, with mouse-coloured hair, hands like shovels, and a mouth like a gin trap. Mace felt sorry for any woman trying to resist her and almost hoped that Adolphus C Fish, Smiling Willie Herbillon and Horace Clarence Lavender would come up against her. He hadn’t the slightest doubt who would come off best, not even if they tackled her all together.

  Berkeley indicated the plan of Nieuwoudt Street and the surrounding alleys he had drawn. ‘There will be four men facing every
downstairs window, and every downstairs door,’ he said, jabbing with a forefinger. ‘Anyone attempting to get out will be arrested and handed over to the Black Maria which will be waiting in Nieuwoudt Street. We’ll use the cold storage plant if there are too many to go into the van.’

  He dabbed at his forehead with a red handkerchief. ‘Wish it were cooler,’ he said. ‘Makes everyone bad-tempered and we don’t want trouble.’ He permitted himself a smile. ‘On the other hand everyone’ll be twice as thirsty and probably twice as drunk. They’ll probably not be able to stand up, in fact, by that time, so I don’t anticipate trouble.

  ‘Captain Mace’ – he gestured at the tall thin figure by his side – ‘will be waiting here’ – he indicated an alley end – ‘in the shadows, waiting to identify the men he wants. He will move across to the front entrance as I go in.’ Berkeley fished out a gold hunter and flicked it open to glance at the time. ‘We shall begin around midnight when we get the signal. By that time, they should have the stuff on the table. You will be with me, Miss Buiderkamp, because there will be women. Sub-inspectors and sergeants will look after the customers below and sort them out, taking names and addresses, and all males will pass through the front door – one at a time, in front of Captain Mace who will be able to examine them carefully underneath the gaslight. Anybody he picks out will be kept separate and closely guarded. Is that clear?’

  There were nods all round and Berkeley smiled. He looked at Mace like Moses presenting the tablets of wisdom on the mountain-top. ‘It can’t go wrong,’ he said. ‘If the bastards get through that lot they’re cleverer than I thought. Perhaps you just didn’t deploy enough men before.’

  He failed to notice Mace’s expression of sheer hatred and glanced again at his watch. ‘We should hear from Josias as soon as they go in,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I hope they enjoy the cham. It might be the last they’ll taste for a long time.’

  The concert couldn’t have been more helpful to the plan. While Willie was moving about his secretive affairs, he saw parts of it from time to time through the open doors of the billiard room as the waiters carried in trays of drinks from the bar.