‘They wouldn’t get to know?’
‘Well, if they do – we move. And that brings me to another point. Most of the girls, I don’t mind telling you, prefer their boys not to have a job so as to make them more dependent. But me, darling, honest, for your own sake I’d rather you had one.’
‘I don’t mind. If I can get one … You know how I’ve tried …’
‘Up west, it’ll be different and I’ll help you. It’s protection for you – no need for you to account to anyone for your means of support; and it’d also mean that we could live together.’
‘Aren’t we going to do that anyway?’
‘Oh, of course! But if you haven’t got a job, it’s much safer for you if I live and work in two different places.’
‘I get it. All right – find me a job, then.’
She kissed him. He looked up and said, ‘Baby, apart from that, what do I have to do?’
‘Love me.’
‘Of course! But nothing else? Don’t you need protection or something?’
‘Me? Apart from the odd sex maniac I can handle anyone: and even them I can usually spot a mile off. No: all you have to do is be.’
‘Okay. But I must say, if you’ll not think me ignorant, I don’t quite see what you’ll get out of it: come to that, what any of you girls do out of having boys.’
She looked at him. ‘I’m just wondering,’ she said, ‘just how much I ought to tell you.’
‘It’s up to you! This truth thing was your idea anyway.’
‘Okey-doke. Well, here it is. Imagine you’re a gigolo – right? You hire yourself out to a dozen women a day. How would you feel?’
‘Exhausted.’
‘No, I mean about your sex life?’
‘Disgusted.’
‘There you are, then. And wouldn’t you feel the need for a real lover – far more than any ordinary woman does?’
Frankie reflected. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said.
‘Well – we do. A ponce, dear, in many cases, is simply an unmarried husband. He’s our little compensation for the kind of life we lead.’
‘All the girls feel that way?’
‘Not all – not even all those who do have ponces. With some of them it’s just to show them off: that they’ve hooked some splendid great big hunk of man.’
‘That’s just like any girl.’
‘A lot of things about whores are, dear, as you’ll discover.’
‘Well – what else?’
‘This is the one I shouldn’t tell you, but I will. A woman always likes to own a man.’
‘So you own me?’
‘Wait! All women like it. An old bag with a gigolo – doesn’t she? A rich wife with a poor husband – doesn’t she too? And even respectable women: don’t they like to boss their husbands somehow if they can? Get the hooks on them some way? Well, with us it’s a mania. And I won’t hide it from you, so there’ll be no tears, no reproaches. There’s nobody in the whole wide world who’s hooked by a woman like a ponce is by a whore.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll put it to you straight: because he’s a criminal and she’s not.’
‘And she could shop him?’
‘Any minute of the day.’
There was silence.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Well, I see that. But it seems to me he’s not without weapons in his jacket, too.’
‘You mean he can bash her?’
‘Not only that. If she shops him, when he comes out – if they get him – then he can carve her up.’
‘Oh, sure! And it’s been done! But darling! She moves first!’
‘Or even kill her.’
‘Life imprisonment, dear.’
‘Also,’ he continued, ‘just walk out on her.’
‘If she doesn’t want it?’
‘Sure.’
She kissed his hands. ‘Well, you know best,’ she said, ‘and with a nice girl like I am, I don’t deny it’s true. But if she’s a bitch and he says cheerioh, she can make it very, very awkward for him if she wants to.’
Frankie withdrew his hands. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder what the poor fucking ponce gets out of it at all.’
She laughed. ‘Well!’ she exclaimed. ‘Nice times if she’s any good, that others have to pay for. Easy money and a lot of it – a great, great deal. A big boost to his ego – doesn’t it make you feel you’re like a king? And then, excitement! They do actually love the life, so many of them.’
‘Born to it, you’d say.’
‘Yes – not like you: you’re not the born type, that’s why I love you.’
‘And have there,’ Frankie asked, ‘been many others before me in your sweet life?’
‘Frank,’ she said. ‘I’ll make a bargain with you. I’ll ask you no questions about anything you did before today: if you’ll agree to do the same so far as my past life’s concerned.’
‘Seems reasonable. Okay.’ He got to his feet. ‘It’s lucky for me,’ he said, ‘that men just can’t do without it. None of them.’
She didn’t answer that but got up too, and they started to clear the table and wash the dishes together.
‘Just one more thing,’ she said from among the suds, ‘and then my little lecture’s ended.’ She turned and faced him. ‘Do be careful, please, about the law. Avoid them if you can and don’t provoke them. The only good relations a ponce can have with coppers is just none at all.’
‘I’m not a dope: I’ll remember.’
‘It’s quite surprising,’ she said, ‘how much they’ll leave you alone, even if they know quite a lot about you, if you keep right clear of them and don’t draw their attention to you in any way at all.’
‘Okay. I’ve got nothing against coppers.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. A lot of ponces are just copper-haters: and that’s so bloody foolish.’
‘Hate them?’ said Frankie, putting down a china plate. ‘Well, me, I don’t – why should I? They’re part of the system just like ship’s officers are – and I never hated them as long as they did their job efficiently and fairly. I didn’t even mind unfairness or even a bit of rough-stuff provided they knew how to keep the old ship sailing on. As for the law – well, I’ve been knocked off once or twice and even bashed up a bit, but I’ve no real reason to complain. The law’s got to be there just like the captain: and I’d say it’s got to be respected, even by anyone who chooses to go against it.’
MR JUSTICE
Edward’s next task was to collect a nark or two: and this was no easy matter. A nark-copper relationship is, in a way, like that of lovers: a particular intimacy that cannot be simply handed over by one officer to another as part of the new officer’s inheritance with the files and addresses and card-indexes. A nark must be personally wooed and won: or rather, he and the copper must discover each other, just as lovers do, and establish personal ties – the nark offering facts and admiration, the copper small rewards in kind and privilege.
The nark’s chief asset in the deal is that really good informers – not so strange as it may seem – are rarer by far than really good coppers are. The copper’s asset is not, as one might imagine, the meagre advantages which, in reality, he can offer to the nark, but the power and prestige the nark imagines he derives from being attached, though indirectly and informally, to an immensely powerful organisation. The nark may be motivated by the love of secrecy (of knowing things that are secret from others, however valueless in themselves), and also, it may be, by the almost voluptuous instinct that exists in certain human beings, to betray. There may even (if the nark be intelligent, which he rarely is or he wouldn’t be one) exist the deep attraction of an awful fear: of playing with hot and very unpredictable fires. Fear, that is, of the Force and also, even, of what may happen to himself: for sharp narks can hardly fail to perceive how frequently, if they fall foul of an officer or he merely gets tired of them, they themselves are apt to disappear suddenly, unaccountably, inside the nick. But even thi
s does not prevent the really devoted nark from reassuming, on release, his former role. For narks in their humble way, like the majestic coppers whom they serve, are dedicated souls.
It was a female copper (plain-clothes – and very fetching ones) who gave Edward sound counsel on this point. ‘Wait till they come to you,’ she said. ‘They will.’ And sure enough, soon after his first weeks on the job during which he’d had the sensation all the time that dozens of invisible, unidentifiable eyes had been weighing him carefully up, a man approached him by the telephone boxes of Royal Oak tube station (where he was trying to catch a sex maniac whose habit it was to wait till a girl entered the box next to his own, immediately dial her number – which he’d previously noted – and when she raised the receiver in astonishment at the quick sound of the bell, utter an obscenity), and the following dialogue took place.
‘He’s not here today,’ the nark said.
‘Who isn’t?’
‘Who you’re looking for.’
‘Who am I looking for?’
‘Madcap Mary.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘He: the feller who makes the calls you’re interested in.’
‘What makes you think I’m interested in any calls?’
This exchange, to both officer and nark, had already established some essential factors. For all human conversations hold inside and beyond them other, and often larger, conversations that remain unspoken, of which the exchange is just the seventh part (if that’s the figure) of the iceberg that breaks surface. Ted knew, for instance, this man knew who he was, what he was after, and something about it. The nark knew he knew all this and that Edward took a lively, but always conditional interest in himself. They’d also assessed quite a bit about each other’s characters, and possible utility, and degrees of reliability and of menace. Beyond this there were whole mushroom clouds of supposition, waiting for crystallisation in good time.
‘I could do with a cup of tea,’ the nark said, suddenly feigning a fairly evident mock humility.
Unlike most narks this creature was not small: nor shifty, nor furtive, nor triple-eyed, nor sordid in his attire. He looked like a bus conductor, say, of a suburban line and nearing retirement. They entered the caff separately, then joined up again after getting their two cups, as if casually, at the table near the window.
There was quite a pause, each waiting for the other to begin. The nark, being the older and the more experienced, held out longer, and Edward broke the silence with, ‘And how did you know about me?’
‘I always do.’
‘Always? No one point me out to you?’
‘Almost always.’
‘How?’
The nark smiled sourly. ‘If you could see yourself now,’ he said, ‘you’d know.’
Vexed, Edward asked him, ‘Why?’
‘You’ve got the double look.’
‘The what?’
‘You’re wearing it now: watch your pals, you’ll get to know it. And then, all coppers stare. Nobody else in England, except kids and coppers, stare.’
‘Go on …’
‘And then, they listen. Even if you’re drunk or bore them stiff, coppers will listen to you.’
‘But we have to.’
‘I’m not saying you don’t: only that you do.’
‘All right. Anything else?’
‘Yes, your shoes. I’ve never yet seen a cop, even got up as a down-and-out or something, who can bear to be seen around if he’s down-at-heel.’
‘Really!’
‘Yes. And then you don’t like running.’
‘Come off it! You mean we never chase anyone?’
‘Oh, of course you do: but you don’t like it.’
‘Why would you say we don’t?’
‘I dunno. Maybe because of those helmets. Even if you’re not wearing them you’re frightened they’ll fall off. Or maybe you just don’t like hurrying. Or exercise of any kind.’
Edward smiled, quite unpleasantly, too. ‘Is that all?’ he said.
‘There’s also your hands.’
‘What about them?’
‘You’re working-men most of you, but you don’t like manual labour. That’s why quite a lot of you join the Force: to get out of manual labour.’
Edward drained his cup. ‘So we’re easy to spot,’ he said. ‘Stick out a mile, you’d say.’
The nark was unabashed. ‘Most of you do, yes. That is, except for women coppers. Maybe it’s just because they’re fewer, or maybe we’re all not quite used even now to the idea of them, but – well: even I quite often fail to spot them.’
‘Even you.’
‘Yes, that’s what I said: even me.’
The nark eyed Edward with modest but assured professional pride. ‘Don’t take it hard,’ he said, ‘from me. I know you’re just starting, and I’m only trying to be of assistance to you.’
‘Thank you,’ said Edward, meditating in the nark’s near future some thoroughly uncomfortable moments.
‘The fact is this,’ the nark continued, lighting a fag and not offering Edward one. ‘You may not approve of what I say, but you and me have one big thing in common: neither of us is mugs: both of us sees below the surface of how things seem.’
‘Yeah,’ Edward said.
‘And I’ll tell you something more,’ the nark went on. ‘It’s even the same between you and the criminals, as you’ll discover. Neither they nor you belong to the great world of the mugs: you know what I mean: the millions who pay their taxes by the pea-eh-why-ee, read their Sunday papers for the scandals, do their pools on Thursdays, watch the jingles on the telly, travel to and fro to work on tubes and buses in the rush hour, take a fortnight’s annual holiday by the sea, and think the world is just like that.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Edward Justice.
‘Well, now,’ said the nark. ‘I don’t want to waste your time. Are you interested in a little case?’
‘I might be …’
‘It’s a small affair but I think it may lead to bigger. In fact, something makes me sure it will do. And if it does I hope you’ll not forget me.’
The nark eyed Edward. ‘Oh, of course not,’ Edward said.
‘Briefly, then, I want you to meet a pimp.’
Edward looked interrogative and said nothing.
‘Here’s the whole tale. This pimp, unless I’m much mistaken, is offering something much more interesting than he seems to be.’
‘Go on …’
‘He works in a saloon bar not far from here: empty glass collector – you know – splendid opportunities for contacts. Well: when the pub closes lots of them, ’specially Irish, still want to go on drinking.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Naturally. So he leads them – some of them – to a Cyprus caff where they can get it after hours.’
‘Not interested. Liquor cases? What you take me for?’
‘Do be patient, officer’ (last word uttered in an urgent whisper). ‘In this speakeasy, I think they also gamble.’
‘Still not interested.’
‘And make other contacts.’
‘Which?’
‘Girls.’
‘That’s better. On the premises?’
‘No.’
‘Then where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh, don’t you. Then how you know they go after girls if you don’t know where they go to – that is, if you really don’t know?’
The nark looked pained. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘are just not going to get anywhere unless we trust each other – up to a point, at any rate.’
‘All right – I trust you: so?’
‘That’s all I ask. Now, listen. He takes them off from the Cyprus caff, this pimp, in groups and on foot – they don’t take taxis. Also, they don’t come back. Now, then: what else but girls would keep drunken men from going back again to a speakeasy that’s a spieler?’
‘If it’s just single girls they go to, I’m still not intereste
d.’
‘I don’t expect you would be. But can it be single girls? Off in a group … no taxi … he can’t distribute them one by one around the area, can he?’
‘So you think it’s a brothel.’
The nark nodded sagely.
‘That might interest me,’ said Edward.
‘I thought so.’
‘But you: why haven’t you followed them to make sure?’
The nark looked bland. ‘Tell me – why should I? It might be dangerous, you know. And I don’t want to be observed. Anyway, it’s not what I’m paid to do. That’s where I think possibly you come in.’
MR JUSTICE (STILL)
The Detective-Sergeant had told Edward that ‘if anything at all big comes up’, he was to inform him and not try to tackle it alone. ‘If you prove to be any good,’ his senior had added, ‘something certainly will turn up, because a good copper always attracts crime to himself. But don’t forget – it’s only with arrest that the real problem of our job begins. There’s the prisoner to be dealt with for his statement and so on, and beyond that the whole machinery of the courts we’ve got to persuade.’ But Edward had vivid recollections of his disappointments when in uniformed days any discovery of his own produced, if reported, a host of seniors who did all the fancy work and took the credit. And knowing success is never blamed, he decided to chance his arm and handle the suspected brothel case alone.
Accordingly, and by appointment, he met the nark at the public-house in question: or rather the nark, as agreed, merely handed an empty glass at 10.15 p.m. (publican’s time) to the individual he accused of being a pimp in order that Edward might be sure of his identity. That, so far as the nark was concerned, ended the proceedings: after this Edward was on his own.
The pimp, surprisingly, was little more than a teenager – twenty-one or two, Edward thought, and looking younger than his age. He was so surprised by the boy’s appearance that against all professional etiquette he ventured a glance, in search of confirmation, at the nark – who very properly ignored it. The pimp, also, was a songster: for between his errands and still holding wallop-stained glasses in casual festoons, he’d pause at a microphone to nasally intone appalling Irish melodies much appreciated by the Celtic boozers who the farther they got from Erin’s isle, adored it all the more.
Mr Love and Justice Page 5