He said: ‘They’re African by origin, I think they’re gerbils, let’s see.’ The cages opened from the top; Stevenson opened one and grabbed an occupant. He held it up by its tail; it seemed to die; it drooped, almost motionless.
‘What does it mean?’ I said to Stevenson.
‘It replaces a hard-on. It’s a tunneller, it goes in where I think it does, it nibbles, it excites, it panics, it dies, and then you pull it out again by the string that you’ve attached to its tail. Of course you have to shave its skin off first so it gives the same nice smooth feel as a prick.’
‘Why breed them here?’ I said, ‘on top of a nightclub?’
‘Don’t be innocent,’ said Stevenson, ‘this is the upstairs.’
‘How do you read it?’ I said.
‘I read money and desire.’
‘Explain,’ I said. ‘Tell me everything you know and think.’
‘When it comes to AIDS,’ said Stevenson, ‘you’re rich, but you’ve got it – you’re loaded with money, but you’re infected, you want to fuck still, but with whom?’ He put the gerbil down and said: ‘There’s money in that. You know what organised crime is – it’s supply and demand.’
And Suarez?’
‘Well, she was bound to get it,’ said Stevenson, ‘wasn’t she?’
I said: ‘Well, that’s murder and you don’t even die.’
Stevenson said: ‘That’s a lot of people.’
‘I know,’ I said.
Stevenson said: ‘My dad was a miner in the north; he died in an explosion a thousand yards down, Geordie Main Colliery.’
‘Do you understand that poor girl Suarez,’ I said, ‘watching herself die in her mirror day by day?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Stevenson, ‘absolutely. You go out to work for next to nothing, and you run a mortal risk.’
‘Poor darling,’ I said, ‘that’s just what I can’t stand, you see?’
‘Ah, stop it,’ Stevenson said, ‘stop it, will you?’
‘How can we stop it, the way we see our work, though?’ I said. ‘What? Just let it all slide?’ I said: ‘My father had a little corner shop, drapery, South London; yet he was in the Engineers during the war and defused mines on the beaches, and I’m very proud of him, glad to be his son. He told me once: “They made me an officer so that I could ask the sergeant for the right tools to go up to it.” I said: “Weren’t you frightened, Dad?” He said: “All the time, but you reckoned you were protected – it was important what we were doing. I wouldn’t have had our boys treading on one of them. ’ ”
‘All right,’ said Stevenson, ‘so what do we do now?’
I said: ‘We get Scalo and Robacci out again and grill them.’
It is so difficult for a police officer to be part of the people that he is paid by the state to control and yet it is sometimes not because he does not want to be part of the people, but because he does not know how to recover his origins until, as in my case, he is faced with a great personal catastrophe, which then becomes every catastrophe, and which changes everything both in himself and around him. Like Socrates, I think that all men must be just towards their own code if they are going to be at all, because in the end one code is all the codes, given that one is a just man. It is possible in my view that a just man should be indifferent to the fate of Carstairs and Suarez – one might as well be indifferent to one’s own fate whereas, as we all know, we are not.
We went straight over to the Factory and walked into Scalo’s cell; Scalo was sleeping on the army blanket, or as near as he could get to sleeping.
I shook him and said: ‘On your feet. Get up. Move.’
He started wiping the sleep out of his eyes and said: ‘What now?’
I said: ‘A few questions upstairs.’ I said to the officer who was with us: ‘Get him dressed and bring him up to 205.’
When Scalo arrived, I said: ‘Look, the choice is easy, Scalo. You either reply to us – otherwise it’s the old game, bright lights and three teams of three officers relieving each other, nine men. They drink the beer, eat the sandwiches and fire the questions – you get fuck all. Well, that’s it. Depends the way you want it, but make up your mind and let’s get started anyway.’
‘You prove I was responsible for these three so-called murders,’ said Scalo, ‘and OK, I pick up the tab.’
I said: ‘That’s right. That’s how it works.’
‘Right,’ said Scalo, ‘so go on and try and prove I’m involved.’
‘Stop looking so happy, will you?’ said Stevenson. ‘As a police officer I hate that. As a police officer I’m not happy in my mind anyway, and so I doubly don’t like it when I see cunts like you looking happy, Scalo, and that’s where your face don’t fit in this room, sweet. I just don’t like your face, Scalo. I don’t like it when I look at happy, guilty people; our code, Scalo, our code.’ He caressed Scalo’s fingers and said: ‘Did anyone ever tell you you had very pretty hands? Well, fancy that, berk, now it’s me, just a humble detective sergeant, that’s telling you.’ He stroked Scalo’s fingers again and said: ‘With sweet fingers like you’ve got there on the end of your hands, you want to go balls out so as not to get them broken then, don’t you?’
Scalo said: ‘What are you trying to say?’
I said: ‘What we’re saying is, you’ve gone too far, Scalo. Over the Parallel and the three deaths you’re wrapped up; you’re yesterday’s wet newspaper, you’re way over the edge.’
Scalo said: ‘There’s no price on it?’
I said: ‘Not on yesterday’s news, no.’
I got up, yawning. ‘We’re going on a short trip now, the three of us,’ I said.
‘Oh yes?’ said Scalo. ‘Where are we off then?’
‘Back to The Parallel,’ I said. ‘Where else? We’re going on a quick trot down there, and you’re going to be the guided tour.’
‘Why so?’ said Scalo.
‘That’s the question people ask themselves as they die,’ I said.
‘I’m not dying,’ said Scalo.
‘No, not yet,’ I said.
We ran him away downstairs to the car and took him round again to the Parallel at that dead hour between day and night when even in London there’s no true light. Driving there, I said to Scalo: ‘How well did you know Dora Suarez?’
He shrugged and said: ‘The name means something, but do I know every little scrubber that comes into one of my places to sing?’
‘Reflect on the question,’ Stevenson said. ‘It was she took the axe in the face, not you.’
When we arrived and I unlocked the place, Scalo said: ‘Can I just go for a shit?’
‘Why not?’ said Stevenson. ‘If it’ll make you smell less bad.’
Stevenson and I waited against the long bar decorated in black and gold, and I switched on its single brilliant spot. Somewhere an automatic fan started up as we stood in the shadow which that one light underlined; it also showed up a thin drifting haze of dust that the fan sent over to the stacked bottles on the shelves, the buckets with their melted ice – all the ceased activity of a closed-down bar.
‘Scalo?’ I called out. Distantly, the long hollow crash then the cistern rang out, its noise important in the silence, and then at last the loo door slammed.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Stevenson said to Scalo when he finally arrived round the far end of the bar, doing himself up at his crocodile belt. ‘Good, because we wouldn’t have wanted you to leave us the way the turds go.’ He said: ‘OK, now this is a further introduction to the easy method. Not that you need it – our methods are the same as yours. Now, are you going to take us on the tour here, or do you want your doorman, Robacci and yourself doing the uphill run, the three of you separately, in front of twenty-seven trained men – because don’t worry, we’ve got them.’
‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘do we start you off with Bowman, Drucker and Rupt, or would you rather tell us what this zoo you’ve got upstairs is about?’
‘Zoo?’ said Scalo. ‘What zoo?’
‘Ah,
now you’re starting off terribly feeble,’ said Stevenson. ‘We’re talking about the gerbils you’ve got pulsating away upstairs.’
‘Inform us, Scalo,’ I said. ‘You’re looking twenty years in the face.’
Scalo said: ‘Look, I know nothing about it, OK?’
Stevenson said: ‘Look, we’re not monsters like you. We just want to meet the farmhand, that’s all. Like friendly, make an acquaintance.’
‘Scalo,’ I said, ‘who was the short man in the grey sports gear running out of the back door of the club? Now look, we really mean it.’
Scalo said: ‘I really couldn’t be helping you there.’
I said: ‘British jails are filthy dirty, Scalo. We don’t have the public funds to get you colour telly, and your Bolivian passport will just be a memory for a very sick old man by the time you get out.’
Scalo said: ‘You like to break a man. There ought to be a law.’
‘We’re all the street,’ I said.
Scalo said: ‘So I don’t make my plane for Milan two o’clock.’
‘No,’ said Stevenson, ‘but there’s a police bus to Brixton at half past ten, and believe me you’ll be on it.’
‘Talk some more, Scalo, guilty man,’ I said, ‘talk some more.’
Stevenson said: ‘These rats were hard fucks for sick condemned men, weren’t they? Weren’t they? Weren’t they?
‘And even more fun if girlie took the rabbit up hers first while your punter jacked off and then maybe followed it,’ he said.
‘And another thing, the girls were easy, weren’t they?’ I said, ‘because once they were infected, they were caught, just like the punters.’
‘I’m not telling you a thing,’ said Scalo.
‘Not going to show us your rats, then?’ I said.
‘I’m saying nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘Still, you’re beginning to understand what serious police work really means, now, aren’t you, Scalo?’ said Stevenson. ‘Because you might have been in danger of forgetting. It’s dead simple. We find the punter and grill him.’
I said to Scalo: ‘By the time our people round at the Factory have finished with you nine-handed, anything you know about these three deaths, we’ll know it; you know how we work.’
‘Next time you put money into London clubs,’ Stevenson said, ‘invest a little more wisely, try and be appreciated, come on less heavy next time when you’ve done your bird.’
‘Meantime, nothing you can tell us about the Suarez/Carstairs/Roatta killer at all?’ I said. ‘Your sportsman with an axe handy, reckons himself in a mirror, fast with a Quickhammer?’
‘It’s your last chance,’ said Stevenson.
Scalo said: ‘I couldn’t help you.’
Stevenson reached a glass off the bar, got his cock out and pissed in it. He handed the glass to Scalo.
‘Drink,’ he said. ‘They say rats get thirsty.’
Session two. We were still all three of us sitting at the bar. I said to Scalo: ‘Now we’re going over the whole lot of this again, and then we’re going to go on and on and on going over it. Your time is our time, and our time over at the Factory is our own time, and that, darling, is your hideous fucking bad luck.’
‘The law says you can hold me for forty-eight hours,’ said Scalo, ‘no more.’
‘You’re going back, way back to the days when you still were someone and had a passport,’ I said. ‘I pity you.’
‘And besides, why take a steam hammer to crack a nut?’ Stevenson said. ‘Five or six hours is all we need, Scalo, and you’ll already never be the same again.’
‘I feel like a beer,’ I said.
‘That’ll be on the club, I suppose,’ Scalo sneered.
‘Who wants to drink your fucking rubbish?’ I said. I went out and got the cans I kept in the boot of the Ford.
When I brought in the Kronenbourgs, Stevenson snapped one open and said to Scalo: ‘Cheers.’
Scalo said: ‘Don’t I score for one?’
I said: ‘You do not, scum.’
Scalo said: ‘What are you doing right now to Robacci, that doorman, Margoulis?’
Stevenson looked at his watch. ‘What, right now?’ he said. ‘Right now the two of them are being broken up separately over at the Factory by Rupt, Drucker and Snaile.’ He added: ‘And it won’t take long either. Margoulis will have grassed by now, he’s a peeper. Peepers always grass.’
‘You people are fucking inhuman,’ Scalo said.
‘All right,’ I said, setting my empty can down. ‘Let’s get at it again then, shall we?’
‘I know what I think, Scalo,’ said Stevenson. ‘I think you must either have got your shares in this club here very cheap, or else you must want to protect them very badly – but in either case you look as if they were starting to weigh heavy round your neck, Scalo, my life and fucking mazel tov; I mean, just look at the trade the place suddenly isn’t doing.’
Scalo said: ‘Normally the police come in tactful.’
Stevenson said: ‘Well, now you see how the police comes on when it’s working on three murders, and like when it’s not being tactful.’
‘Suarez,’ I said. ‘You might as well spill, Scalo, we’ve got all our time. The sporty little man in the running gear.’
‘Look if I knew anything,’ said Scalo, ‘I’d have made a deal with you hours back, but the fact is I’m mostly abroad, and I tell you, I know nothing about these deaths. Felix Roatta was a cunt who come on too hard and greedy and lost his chops down to it, but these women’s deaths, I tell you, I know fuck all about.’ He added: ‘Anyway I don’t understand. There’s a tariff with you people upstairs; it was set up long ago.’
I said: ‘Yes, well, this time your tariff’s gone off the edge of the plate.’
‘Come on now,’ said Scalo, ‘let’s be reasonable, can’t we, there must be a price on this. OK if it’s steep.’ He looked at his watch and said: ‘Christ, I have to be in Milan tomorrow afternoon like I said, the plane won’t wait, so how about it?’ He said: ‘OK, so, one, I drop the Parallel Club, there’s been trouble, nasty, right, OK, it got its knackers caught in its knickers, so we get out at a cash sum and I throw you the folk in with it, do I care, I do not – easy with the noughts at the end of the banker’s draft is all. So. Cash,’ said Scalo. ‘Right, well, let’s dream of a figure – I say just dream of one for openers, is all.’
I said: ‘You pay in dollars?’
‘Always, always in dollars,’ said Scalo with a pacifying smile. ‘Yes.’
I said: ‘A case of advanced AIDS. An axe death. An old lady of eighty-six thrown into the front of her clock. What does that run out at in dollars?’
‘Now don’t fun me up,’ said Scalo. ‘Now please.’
I said to Stevenson: ‘I think we’ll just run him as far up the mast as he’ll go and see what happens to him when he gets to the top.’
Stevenson said to Scalo: ‘So that we’re to understand that you’re by way of offering a bribe to two police officers.’
Scalo said: ‘When you’ve got your knees a little browner, you’ll understand. You’re both quite new on this, I would think.’
Stevenson said to me: ‘Hasn’t hell suddenly got so fucking crude these days – it makes you feel like putting on clean clothes.’ He added: ‘How long shall we try and get them with the DPP?’
‘Twenty years each wouldn’t be long compared to eternity,’ I said, ‘which is all Carstairs and Suarez have in front of them now.’
Session three, still in the Parallel bar. I was saying to Scalo: ‘Perhaps you were more on the management side only, but for me you still knew all about the gerbils and what they were there for.’
‘And we haven’t all our time,’ said Stevenson, ‘so which version are you choosing? You either own shares in the Parallel Club and no vermin, or else you own both the vermin and the shares.’
‘I still badly want a word with the sporty man in he photograph, Scalo,’ I said. ‘In fact, more I think about him, more he
turns me on.’
Scalo said: ‘Names? I know no names, folks. What are names?’
‘The wrong ones carry a lot of porridge,’ Stevenson said.
I said: ‘So you know nothing about Roatta, you know nothing about the gerbils, nothing about our disappearing man in the club photograph – so what are you, some kind of immaculate fucking birth or what? It would be a right marvel to hear something you did know about, because if you go on not knowing about anything like this any more, you’re going to turn into a fairy tale, my old darling, and I don’t know a crown court in the land who believes in them.’
‘Anyway,’ Stevenson said to Scalo, ‘there’s no point spreading butter on a heart attack is there? We’ve got Margoulis, we’ve got Robacci, and now we’ve got you – so until we get answers here that really really interest us, we’re just going to go on and on like this, eating you up one after the other until in the end some fucker suddenly farts and decides he does know something, OK? And until that moment comes, you, Margoulis, Robacci and every other saint in the calendar is going indoors to take shade at the Factory, and don’t think Mr fucking McGuffin the lawyer is going to get you out of there because we’ll fire three murders and the Parallel Club at him straight in the mush, and the press will have a lot of fun with it. We’ll see to that end of it, don’t worry your heart out.’
Scalo said: ‘I didn’t realise it was that bad.’
‘Well, it is,’ I said. ‘It’s very, very serious, even our folk upstairs at the Factory are sneezing hard. The press is starting to poke about in it now, too, and as for us, a policeman being an expensive thing, the public wants a run for its money, so there we are. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?’
‘So you see, Scalo, don’t you,’ said Stevenson, ‘that these three murders here are a really rotten rotten case, and that we at the Factory so far have every reason to think that Dora Suarez was deliberately infected with AIDS for financial reasons – that the Parallel Club offered a service of infected call girls for rich, seropositive young cunts, who, knowing that they no longer had a chance of coupling with the pure young daughter of a duke, had no option other than sexual relations with women as infected as themselves for the rest of their lives, which is to say on average three years with AIDS, and when I see villains making money out of that, we don’t like it. Strange folk, aren’t we?’
I Was Dora Suarez Page 15