JUDAS PIG

by Horace Silver

  ‘Got nothing on this weekend,’ I say.

  ‘As you know we’ve got a sauna over in Canning town,’ says Danny. ‘And there’s a lovely little gym upstairs. Come over there first, have a nice work out and then we’ll slip up to Blackpool.’

  ‘Sounds fucking sweet, boys,’ says Ronnie. ‘I’ll lay on transport and a driver.’

  ‘What do you reckon, Billy?’ says Danny, as we wave off Ronnie Olive and pull our motor back onto the Old Kent Road, heading back towards east London.

  ‘Shitting himself, ain’t he?’ I say.

  ‘That’s what I reckon,’ says Danny.

  ‘Stands to reason,’ I say. ‘He’s lost Blackheart and now he wants to pal himself up with some younger bods to draw their strength. And then put the word about that he’s got some new heavy help on the firm.’

  ‘Fucking little user cunt,’ growls Danny. ‘I fucking hate south London villains. Always trying to recruit outsiders to do their dirty work.’

  ‘And when I got up to carve myself a bit of lamb, he never took his eyes off me,’ I say.

  ‘That’s a good sign for us though, Billy.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Paranoia. The man’s at a low ebb. We can pal him up and exploit his weakness.’

  ‘We’ll have to be slippery though,’ I say. `You know what they’re like these old-school villains. They want to keep the sweets for themselves and hand round the shit-parcels to everyone else.’

  ‘True, but what about the peepshow?’ says Danny. ‘Any good to us?’

  ‘Fucking joking, ain’t you?’ I say. ‘Fucking shit up there. Full of fucking fat slags and nuclear power stations. We spend too much time up there, we’ll end up with crabs and two fucking heads.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck the peepshow. We’ll poach his drug connection then pull out.’

  ‘Sweet,’ I say. ‘Christ, talking about extra heads takes me back to the time I worked up the meat market.’

  ‘You’ve had a fucking job?’ says Danny, incredulous.

  ‘Only for a few months, when I was sixteen. My old man got me a start working in a chicken shop up at Smithfield. Robbed the gaff fucking blind I did. Got the tin tack for it. You’d get these goat-fuckers driving up from the sticks and bringing in boxes of chicken. I’d lob them straight over the wall into the shop next door then carve up the dough later. Came in three grades it did, the chicken. You’d get A grade, which was ream. B grade, which was a bit moody, sort of bruised and stuff like that. Then you’d get C grade, which the late-night fried chicken shops would buy. And some of it was well fucking weird, I’m telling you. Chickens with three legs, some with no wings. Cancerous growths, fucking carbuncles. I even saw one with a head at both ends, like that fucking llama in Dr Doolittle. Fuck knows where that one came from.’

  ‘Blackpool, probably.’

  EIGHT THIRTY ON the morning of the trip Danny tells me he ain’t coming. It’s bad form but no real skin off my nose, he’s a miserable bastard on awaydays. Goes to bed straight after the evening news. After hooking up, the two of us head over to our sauna for a workout. We’ve had a bit of grief there and it came to a head last night. One of the birds working the massage tables has been getting bundles of aggravation from her ponce, a slag who goes by the name Ranking Dread. He’s supposed to be the top chap out of the Yardies, but we eat up reputations for breakfast and shit them out for dinner. The bigger and tougher the better. As well as being a nuisance, Ranking Dread’s been hanging around the gaff, slapping his tart about, taking her dough and blowing it all on the gee-gees. Very bad for business, not to mention his tart’s face and self-esteem. So me and Danny plotted him up and cornered him on the stairs.

  ‘You Ranking Dread?’ said Danny.

  ‘Some peoples call I that,’ he said, in a treacly Jamaican accent, while stropping up for a confrontation. Without blinking, Danny shoved a Colt .45 in his face, just so there was no misunderstanding.

  ‘This sauna is ours,’ he pointed out. ‘And if you show your skinny, nigger, Jamaican arse round here again, never mind about Ranking Dread, you’ll be stone cold, Ranking fucking Dead, understand?’ Course he did. It’s funny how a .45 shoved up the nostrils of a liberty taker clarifies their whole perspective.

  Ronnie Olive rolls up in a Roller about nine with two other men we’ve never seen before. One stays with the car keeping dog-eye, while the other walks up with him to the sauna. These are obviously his bits of help.

  ‘Hello, Ronnie,’ say me and Danny.

  ‘Hello, boys,’ says Ronnie, as we exchange handshakes.

  ‘Everything sweet, Ronnie?’ says Danny.

  ‘Nah, not really,’ says Ronnie. ‘Polish Mick got topped last night.’

  ‘Fuck me, sorry to hear that, Ronnie,’ says Danny. `Anything we can do?’

  ‘Thanks for the offer, Danny. But it’s being taken care of.’ Now I’m starting to see why Ronnie’s looking for new pals off the plot. His own people are dropping like flies. First Blackheart and now his best pal Polish Mick. Plus, Ronnie’s getting old, and like a lot of old gangsters it’s too late for him to turn the game in. You don’t get a gold watch and pension in this game. When you get too old, more than likely you’ll end up with a bullet in the back of the head and a nice plot in the local cemetery.

  ‘By the way, boys, this is Micksy Martin,’ he says, and we exchange cordial greetings. Rule of gangster thumb, whenever proper people are first introduced to each other, surnames are always included. That way there can be no mistakes, no offence and no careless show of disrespect to fan flames of war. And now we know it’s Micksy Martin, we understand we’ve been introduced to a very proper and well-respected south London armed robber. Micksy wants a massage, a dirty one. Is there any other kind? So I grab one of the best birds we’ve got and tell her to go through the card, The Executive, with all the trimmings, on the house. Proper people deserve proper treatment, and believe me, we are the properest people in the East End. While Micksy’s having his spuds drained courtesy of the house, Ronnie Olive gets changed and comes into the gym area for a workout, setting me to thinking, that he may well be the godfather of south London, but trussed up in a pair of bollock-busting Lycra shorts, he looks like the last turkey left in the shop, as he strolls in and starts to bitch-slap the punchbag.

  Me and Danny hover in the background sniggering, as Ronnie makes himself look right a cunt by hokey-cokeying round the bag for another thirty seconds before collapsing onto a nearby stool, blowing like a beached whale.

  ‘I hope he knows how to throw a party,’ I whisper to Danny. ‘‘Cos he sure can’t throw a fucking punch.’

  ‘Fuck me, you look good on that bag, Ronnie,’ says Danny, straight-faced.

  ‘Cheers, Danny,’ says Ronnie, breaking into a shit-eating grin. ‘Last thing a fighter loses is his punch.’ Hoggy arrives as we’re finishing our workout, and if the truth be known I’ve found this whole little episode quite disappointing. Ronnie Olive is, by reputation, one of the most feared men in British criminal history. Before I met him I had him up on a pedestal as a sort of British Al Capone, but in less time than it takes to shake dry a pissy knob, he’s blown away all my preconceptions. All I see is a sixty-five-year-old king of the kids, who don’t have the savvy to spot some Young Turks taking the piss out of him. No matter, he’s got something we want, so we’ll just string the cunt along till we get it, then drop him like a ball of hot snot.

  ‘Boys, meet Smoothound, says Ronnie, introducing Hoggy and me to our driver, as the three of us climb into the Roller.

  ‘Just call me Smoothie,’ he says, as we set off with Ronnie in the passenger seat and me and Hoggy in the back.

  This is the first time I’ve met the man driving as well, but I’ve heard all about him. He’s another well-known south London trigger-man. One of those faces you hear about all over the show but never seem to bump into. First impression’s always the best. He’s a coolie, he’s wearing a three quarter length wolf fur coat, got a pony tail, is drippi
ng with gold, and got on a pair of stack heels to give him an extra two inches in height. Don’t like the cunt!

  ‘We have met before, Smoothie,’ says, Hoggy excitedly and almost coming in his pants. ‘Long ways back. I was down in Marbella to see The Honeydripper when he won the world middleweight title. You was in his corner with Ronnie Knight and Freddie Foreman. Great fighter, weren’t he, The Honeydripper?’

  ‘Fuck me, that was a proper night, that was,’ laughs Smoothie, managing to swagger in his seat, a feat I’ve never seen achieved before. ‘All nearly went off down there. We was minding The Honeydripper off. Anyway, he’s in his changing room just before the fight starts, and he tells me he’s gonna come out waving the Jamaican flag. So I slipped out and had a word with Freddie and Ronnie, and a few of the other chaps, and they went fucking garrity. Ended up all storming into his changing room and putting it right on him. Freddie told him straight: “You’re going out flying the Union Jack or you’ll never walk in a fucking straight line again.” Well, his fucking arsehole falls through the floor, don’t it. One minute he’s giving it all the pussy-claat this and bomber-claat that, then after he wins the fight he starts talking cockney to the TV geezer, going on about the old British Bulldog spirit, Dunkirk and all that. What a fucking mug!’

  ‘Never really liked the flash cunt, anyways,’ says Hoggy, beetrooting and backtracking like a right fucking bitch-boy. ‘I mean, a great fighter but a slag as a person.’

  BLACKPOOL, SAYS THE road sign. Piss-hole, barks my brain. I ain’t impressed in the slightest. A hazy drizzle is helping to mist up the inside of the car as we crawl along the start of the prom, so I wind my window down to let in some fresh air, only there ain’t none. Just a poxy fucking stink of sugar-sick candyfloss merging with economy burgers and burnt onions, sizzling angrily in overused cooking fat, the whole artery-clogging concoction nearly causing me to spew over the back of Ronnie Olive’s head. Speedily closing my window back up it sets me to thinking that if Sunset Strip in Hollywood is America’s boulevard of broken dreams, then Blackpool’s Golden Mile is surely England’s boulevard of broken ice-creams. There’s one splattered every five yards or so, like the whole stretch has been dive-bombed by some fucking bird with the arsehole of an elephant. Should we deign to sample the city’s cultural delights there’s two shows on in town. You’ve got the choice of either Me and My Girl, featuring a ‘galaxy of stars’ I’ve never even fucking heard of, or a fifties rock ‘n’ roll revival show featuring The Wild-Kats, who, judging by their publicity photos, look more like they should be called The Comb-Over Cunts. None of this sort of fucking pleb shit is fit for a gangster as refined as yours truly. In fact I’d rather slide down a ten foot razor blade using my bollocks as brakes than sit through the sort of piss-poor shit they offer as entertainment in this fucking khazi-on-sea.

  And not only is the sea a shitty shade of brown, but there ain’t affluence at all from what I can see, only effluence. That and droves of beaten-down families in matching Matalan plastic wind-cheaters, gawping at us as we cruise slowly past them. Must be the first time they’ve ever seen a Roller full of London criminals sneering down their noses at them.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ growls Smoothie. ‘No wonder they call this the Golden Mile, ‘cos it’s a right fucking piss-hole.’ And never was a truer word said.

  ‘You should see it at night,’ Hoggy bristles, trying to save face. ‘It’s alive.’

  ‘What with, fucking cockroaches?’ I say, to a round of chuckles, as Hoggy deflates like a sex-doll after being gang-raped.

  ‘Fuck me,’ says Ronnie. ‘I lived in Glasgow for a while but I ain ‘t never seen so many ugly fucking people in one gaff as this. Have a butcher’s over there. That bird’s got a face like a bucket of smashed crabs. Cor, I wouldn’t touch that with a Pope John Paul.’

  ‘What’s a Pope John Paul?’ I say.

  ‘A five-foot fucking Pole,’ says Ronnie, as the Roller rocks with laughter.

  Surprise, surprise. The hotel’s a fucking khazi. Hoggy dealt with the bookings so I should have guessed. It looks half all right from the outside, but as we walk into the reception, we’re hit with a chuck-up that whiffs like a Cancer Research shop that’s been closed for six moon.

  ‘This is the best hotel in Blackpool.’ Says Hoggy proudly, but ain’t no one saying a word. We don’t need to, the disappointment is written all over our faces. A bellboy, who looks like Herman Munster, and is decrepit enough to have fought at the Somme, materialises to show us to our rooms. As we cram into a lift that not even a Columbian miner would ride in, he raises one of his once-white gloves to his ghoulish mouth and coughs up tiny specks of bloody grolley into it. Think I’ll skip room service. More disappointment on leaving the lift, as we follow Herman Munster over sick-coloured carpets and on through a maze of stinky rat run walkways, on whose discoloured walls hang faded watercolours, obviously painted by a blind cretin.

  My heart sinks down to my feet when I turn the key and enter my room. It’s fucking horrendous! Faded shit stains in the toilet bowl, a short and curly in the shower, a cracked sink and towels rough enough to scrape the skin from a camel. Everything else in the room is either worn or scratched, and without even looking, I just know that if I pull back the bed sheets, they’ll look like the shroud of Turin. After an animated talk to myself I manage to convince my reasoned better half to take it on the chin, and so slip downstairs to have a chat with Ronnie, who’s ordered himself up an afternoon snack by the time I get there.

  ‘Nice rooms eh, Ronnie?’ I spit sarcastically, while plonking myself wearily down beside him and pouring myself a cup of tea.

  ‘It’s cheap, son, but it ain’t fucking cheerful, is it?’

  ‘Fucking right, Ronnie. How’s the steak sandwich?’

  ‘Tougher than the Times crossword, son.’

  ‘That tight cunt has booked us into a right fucking khazi.’

  ‘I ain’t fucking happy, son. I’ve hung out with George Raft and Meyer Lansky in Monte Carlo, and this fucking prick brings me here. This town’s a fucking clinker on the arse-beard of humanity.’

  ‘Make you right, Ronnie. We can’t do business with a fucking cheapskate like that.’

  ‘Don’t worry, son, we’ll fuck him off.’ This is all music to my ears because all I wanted was an in for me and Danny on the drugs angle, and then Hoggy and his poxy peepshow can go suck the Gorgonzola off of a gimp’s helmet.

  Later that night we hook up with Ronnie’s contacts, the Mason brothers, in an Italian restaurant. As well as bringing in reasonably respectable quantities of puff and pills, the brothers control the run outs, or mock auction houses. It’s a good screw. Mug punter walks in and makes a bid for what he thinks is a right bargain. Lays down a long ‘un and strolls back out into the pissing rain clutching two quid’s worth of shite. But it turns out these two boys have got bundles of style. Top of the range Porsches each, number plates RUN 1 and RUN 2. And what’s more to the point, they’re lapping us up like fresh cream.

  But Hoggy’s got a sniff of something. The prick’s fishing but coming up with nothing. After dinner Ronnie makes excuses and creeps back to the hotel for an early night, so me and Smoothie give Hoggy the slip and head off with the two brothers to a club called Apples. As is expected, it’s full of plums! No matter, we get straight on the booze and into the marching powder. As my old Uncle Albie used to say, ‘If you wanna schmooze ‘em, first you gotta booze ‘em.’ And true to form the bollocks starts flowing along with the champagne. Later in the night I clock Smoothie copping a sample Moroccan soap and some ecstasy tabs, so when he slips off to powder his hooter, I slip the brothers my phone number and word them that if they ever get stuck, call me. It’s a bit of a dog’s stroke, but Ronnie and Smoothie ain’t family. And besides, gangster-land ain’t dog eat dog, it’s dog fuck dog. And if it comes off, then this third world saunter would at least have been worthwhile.

  OUR FIRM HAS just bought a wine bar-cum-club called Chillers, a brick throw from behin
d West Ham football ground. The purchase coincides with Stevie getting out of the nick full time, which means gangster cuddles, handshakes and good wishes all round. With just a couple of small provisos. The gaff was going cheap because the previous owners were having problems with a firm out of Chadwell Heath, in Essex, called the Chads. The Chads were running the gaff at weekends and pocketing all of the door dough, which was a large slice of the club’s takings. The then owners had neither the bottle nor the resources to do anything about the situation. So we slipped in, quietly nicked the gaff for crabs and then strolled in the following weekend and informed the doormen their services were no longer required. When Johnny Paris, the top man in the Chads found out, he was well gutted. He knew he risked losing respect down to this, not to mention other door contracts, so he’s put together what he considers to be a tasty little firm, and the word through the criminal grapevine is he’s coming down tonight to take the door back. But we’re already here, tooled up to the eyebrows and ready to smack his arse and send him running back to white van land. It’s just after midnight when they stroll in. Bodybuilders mostly, no-neck muscle-heads from the ‘burbs, jacked up on juice and ready for fisticuffs. Sorry boys, ain’t going to be any Marquess of Queensbury here tonight. First one through the door is a great big blonde dude, the bravest of a not very wild bunch.

  Danny steps forward and hits him full pelt with a fireman’s axe, right in the chest. It misses blondie’s heart by a hair’s breadth and he staggers back, his mouth catching flies, and with the axe embedded deep in his breast bone. Everything freezes for a split second, before blondie actually realises he’s been done, and starts to scream the roof down. He legs it out into the street and starts running round with his arms flapping and squawking like a chicken with a rocket up its arse. Then Frankie fires off a couple of rounds into the ceiling, causing the Chads to have it straight on their toes. Bit disappointing really, we were expecting at least a bit of a tear up. We don’t think any more of it, but as we’re all piling into a pal’s Jag outside, a carload of plain-clothes Old Bill come screeching to a halt right up our bottle. So we take off, and to slow Old Bill down Stevie lets one go, shattering Plod’s windscreen and sending them crashing into a lamp post. So I’m thinking, sweet, we’re out of this one. But we don’t get no more than fifty yards up the road when we come to a halt in traffic queuing at a red light, and before we know it, one brave cozzer, either looking for a medal or an early pension, has jumped right onto the back of our motor and is trying to break the window with his fucking truncheon.