JUDAS PIG

by Horace Silver

  And so, after kneeling down by the Bug’s side I tell him that all we want is his dough and then we’ll make sure we get him to a hospital, pronto. He nods in the affirmative so I then go on to remind him that all we’re dealing with here is dough and he’s got plenty of that already, and no matter how much he’s got it won’t be no good to him if he’s a vegetable or six feet under, after which, he nods again. An acknowledgement that sends me over the moon because it finally means we’re getting somewhere.

  ‘How much you want?’ he manages to croak weakly.

  ‘What’s he saying, what’s he saying?’ screams Danny from the sidelines. ‘I heard him saying something.’

  ‘He wants to know how much we want,’ I shout back.

  ‘How much do we want? How much is his fucking life worth?’ So that’s that! I tell The Bug there’s no deals. He has to hand over the full whack. Of course, we don’t know what the full whack is, but he don’t know that. And so, after finally realising it’s do or die, he chokes a little in the back of his throat, coughs up a large parcel of blood-streaked phlegm, then nods once more, at which point I turn to my firm and give them the thumbs up. With The Bug unexpectedly cooperating, the tension in the cellar begins to dissipate and the atmosphere at once seems more relaxed. As best as he can out of his broken mouth, The Bug starts to spew forth details in slow, stuttery syllables, attempting to explain the exact whereabouts of the hidden treasure.

  With the patience of a saint, and a pen and piece of paper, I eventually cobble together the directions, whilst all the time still having to reassure The Bug we’re going to let him live once we’ve got his dough. I’m also having to keep Danny at bay as he lingers in the background, growling about how we should carry on the torture until we’re sure The Bug ain’t having us on. But as I see it, we’ve beaten one positive lead out of the man so far and so there’s no need for further punishment at this stage. Leaving The Bug in the capable hands of Stevie and Frankie, me and Danny drive as instructed to a multistorey car park behind a supermarket in Ilford town centre. The ground floor of the car park is full when we arrive, but as we ascend slowly up the ramps that join the floors, the lines of parked cars gradually thin out and on reaching level five we pull up to see only two cars occupying the entire floor. After checking the registration number of a green, late model Citroën estate, I tell Danny that this is our baby, and so we pull up alongside.

  While Danny waits in the driver’s seat I get out and give my eyes a chance, then discreetly as possible run my hand under the front left wheel arch. Bingo, there’s a set of keys taped under there, just as The Bug said there would be. I smile and nod to Danny, open up the car and climb in, and after retrieving the parking ticket out of the glovebox, I then drive the car back to our slaughter in Mile End with Danny bottling me off close behind. Using screwdrivers to take off the car’s interior panels, we’re greeted by a sight to warm the cockles of any criminal’s heart. Five hundred smacker-fucking-roonies packed sardine tight inside all four door panels, the sight of which sends me cock-a-hoop. But Danny stays poker-faced and starts cunting and fucking at the heavens, like a sex-starved whore confined to a convent, because he reckons that there’s another five motors plotted up somewhere, and all stashed with the same amount of readies inside of each one. With no time to waste we climb into our motor and hightail it back to Canning Town to set back to work on The Bug. Bad news awaits our arrival. Because of the severity of his beating, The Bug appears to be hovering close to death. So after informing Frankie and Stevie we’ve turned up trumps on one motor, the four of us repairs upstairs to the bar area to conflab and plot our next move.

  ‘He’s in a fucking bad way,’ says Frankie. ‘Looks like his lungs are filling up with blood. If we leave him here I don’t think he’ll make it through the night.’

  ‘Fuck that dry-lunch-cunt,’ growls Danny. ‘He’s cakeo’d. He’s gotta pay up.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck this, says Stevie. ‘Let’s push him to the limit. If he mullers, too fucking bad.’

  ‘But if we muller him,’ I say. ‘We’ll have to top Jacko as well, and what’s the point? We got half a mil, let’s just leave it be. Be bad fucking karma if we top him.’

  ‘Bad fucking karma?!’ screams Danny. ‘What about the bad fucking karma when he finds out it’s us and makes moves to have us topped. Let me go back to graft on the slag, and if we don’t get any further joy I’ll just slit his throat and throw him in the docks. What do you say, Frankie?’

  ‘Fuck it, Danny, Billy’s right. We’ve got half a mil down to nishmans. Besides, I don’t wanna top him, he ain’t a bad bloke. Let’s just frighten the life out of Jacko and let the pair of them go. Then we might still get a bite of the cherry at a later date.’

  But Danny ain’t happy at the split in the gang, especially as now it’s him and Stevie against me and Frankie. He knows I’m playing the divide and rule game, but fuck him and his horrible greed. I came out of my house today with only a gorilla in my back pocket, but tonight I’ll be going home with an extra one hundred and twenty five thousand of the cunts in a carrier bag, and that ain’t a bad day’s work in my mind. But as the seconds pass in stony silence I can feel Danny’s eyes burning into the side of my head, as if to say my bottle’s gone.

  ‘All right, Frankie. If you think its best,’ says Danny, knowing that if he tops The Bug without all our consent, it weakens any stand we may have to make a later date, if any of The Bug’s firm finds out we’re behind his murder. But fuck Danny anyway. I don’t need his blessing over The Bug. If he thinks I’ve lost my bottle that’s up to him. Who does the fuck does he think he is? The emperor fucking Nero, standing in the coliseum and giving the thumbs up or down on some poor fucker about to be thrown to the lions? So as a result of our firm’s discord, The Bug has only lost half a mil and lives to fight another day. But no matter how good his recovery, he’ll never be the same man again after the beating he’s taken. In order to wrap things up we drag Jacko out of the toilet, and after Stevie takes off his blindfold, Danny sticks a gun in his mouth and warns him that if any of us hears as much as a whisper about this episode, we’ll kidnap him and torture him to death. I personally feel that sticking a gun in Jacko’s mouth is well over the top, because after the experience he’s just had, he didn’t need any further threats to get him to keep his mouth shut. It’s plain to see that man’s shitting red-hot bricks.

  With The Bug’s condition deteriorating badly we quickly summon up a motor, and as soon as it arrives carry him out of the pub and dump him on the back seat, after which, we order Jacko to drive out as far into the sticks as possible before offloading him outside a hospital. That way it’ll be thick-as-shit, carrot-crunching Old Bill that will be snuffling around The Bug, rather than top notch London pigs, who’ll suss out it’s a gang-related incident after about five minutes of checking out his identity and injuries. So while Jacko takes The Bug on a magical mystery tour of the provinces, as he slips into a life threatening coma on the back seat of a stolen car, our firm slips over to our slaughter to divvy up his drug dough.

  CLUB FOOT IS a late-night drinker in the basement of a kebab shop on the Dalston Road, Hackney, that’s run by a good pal of ours Greek Nicky, a retired armed robber with more form than Desert Orchid. It’s a place for proper people to mingle while their tarts jingle, plod free. You wouldn’t even know it was there, apart from the bumper-to-bumper prestige motors parked all hours in the streets outside. And Old Bill hardly ever bothers the gaff, because if ever they want to lift a proper face for a little heart-to-heart, the chances are he’ll eventually wash up in Club Foot to shoot the shit and share a sherbet with Greek Nicky. So they’ll flop on him when he eventually leaves. Saves the pigs on shoe leather and petrol, and also means they ain’t got to be hunting about all over the manor. And the straight-goers who live in the street put up with the comings and goings, because our presence keeps away all the shitbag burglars and car thieves. In fact if I remember right, the last time someone’s car got bro
ken into down here was about three years ago. A couple of good pals of mine caught the little scumbag on the job and chopped off a couple of fingers from his right hand there and then. Instant justice, that’s what it is. Sort of a bit like the Taliban, but without the turbans and dietary restrictions. After parking up my motor I bowl down the stairs and make my way through the club, garnering discreet respect from various faces huddled conspiratorially around candlelit tables while plotting their next bit of graft. The lights are dim, but then again so are most of the faces that use this gaff.

  As I make my way past the bar area, my gangster radar tunes in to a posse of three strangers making way too much noise for a gaff like this. Total fucking ice-creams by the looks of them. Togged up in cheap suits, they’re buying expensive drinks, always a bad sign. After making a mental note of their tobys, I start to work my way between a few empty tables towards my firm, who are seated in a roped off section reserved specially for us, and that takes prime position next to the club’s tiny wooden dance floor, where the resident house band, Gabby Reynolds and his Rumour, are in full swing and murdering the jazz standard Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. Not that they’re partial about killing jazz, they’ll massacre anything from Mantovani to Madness. And Gabby, whose voice is as tired as his patter, starts every night with the same old stand-up cornball routine. After stepping up onto the dance-floor stage in his stack-heeled, black patent Chelsea boots, real-plastic strides and fringed country and western shirt, complete with shiny sweat patches under the armpits, he’ll stand there peering into the crowd and looking like a little camp teapot, his left hand on his hip and his right hand holding out a double gin and tonic. After which, he’ll raise the glass to his lips and take a slug, put his mouth too close to the over-amplified microphone and say in his cheese-grater rasp of a voice, ‘Hello, luvvies, I must tell you. I went to see my doctor today and he said, “Gabby, you’ve got a split personality.”‘ Then there’ll be a pregnant pause, until someone with too much booze inside them will shout back, ‘Well, why don’t the two of you fuck off home then?’ Cue ripples of laughter, followed by Gabby retorting deadpan, ‘Sorry, darling, I don’t do requests.’

  Once the banter’s finished it’s show time; Gabby’ll whisper ‘Salute’ into the microphone and then ask the audience to raise a toast to the ‘Chairman of the Board, the one and only Frank Sinatra.’ Which is the cue for his band to launch into an execrable medley of Frank Sinatra classics with Gabby running roughshod over the maestro’s legacy like a lumberjack treading saw logs, and with hardly anyone in the club taking a blind bit of fucking notice. But it does strike me as I tip Gabby the wink just before reaching my firm’s table, that maybe I should ask him and his band to knock out the Pink Panther theme for Danny, in homage to the disgraceful little pink number he donned a little while back. But Danny probably wouldn’t find the joke that funny and would end up wanting to top Gabby. Not that Gabby would mind anyway, I suppose, because the poor fucker’s just been diagnosed as having inoperable throat cancer, down to his hundred-a-day habit for the last forty years. It’s just a thought, but maybe he should change the name of his band to Gabby Reynolds and his Tumour. And speaking of jazz and Gabby’s desecration of its hallowed place in our culture, it’s just one more thing that whitey’s fucked up and should have left well alone. Jazz was black American. OK, with more than a little input from a smattering of Yankee bohemian Jews. It was an expression of freedom and rebellion. Four hundred years of whippings, torture and rape by white slave-masters, bottled up and blown out of a jazzman’s horn. Spiralling chromatic runs screeching, ‘Fuck you, whitey. And your blue-eyed Jesus!’

  And not only was it a rejection of all things pale-faced and puritan, you could fucking dance to it. Well, black people could. Then whitey stuck his Roman hooter in, only problem being he couldn’t cut the moves or the mustard. I mean whitey’s all right with stuff like line dancing, jigs and polkas, in fact anything that’s dead from the waist down, if you know what I mean. So what did he do? He intellectualised jazz and sat down and nodded to it. Then the fat blokes in the hand-knitted pullovers and food in their beards moved in. The dancing stopped, the honeys left for rhythm and blues and the whole scene died a slow agonising death.

  ‘Who’s the three ice-creams in the C&A whistles?’ says Danny to me by way of introduction, as I pull out a seat to sit down at the table.

  ‘How am I supposed to fucking know?’ I say, pouring myself a full glass of bubbly. ‘Harpo, Groucho and Chico, ain’t it?’ After which, Frankie and Stevie crane their necks to have a gander.

  ‘Weren’t there a fourth one?’ says Stevie, his face now furrowed with inquisitiveness.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Frankie. ‘Karl.’

  ‘Karl Marx was a fucking communist,’ I tell them

  ‘Naah,’ says Danny. ‘That was that little sweaty-sock with the potato head and the high-pitched voice. The one that got caught in the fucking toilets.’

  ‘That was Jimmy Somerville,’ I say. ‘He was a Communard.’

  ‘That what I just fucking said,’ growls Danny.

  You know what? Sometimes I don’t know why I bother, because it’s always the same with these baked-bean brains. A conversation will start off with a sentence that seems reasonable enough, but with the help of these clowns, it’ll veer off on some ridiculous tangent and end up on the dark side of the fucking moon with no one any the wiser. Clever criminals my firm may be, but if brains were dynamite none of them would have enough to blow their hooters. OK, so I ain’t no genius myself, but I do try. Suppose I just have to face up to the fact that in my circles I ain’t never going to bump into any members of the intellectual elite, only former members of the Inter City Firm.

  ‘D’you think those cunts over there are cozzers, Frankie?’ says Danny.

  ‘Nah,’ says Frankie. ‘Cozzers only wear suits when they’re lying their bollocks off in the box.’

  ‘Fucking door policy in this gaff is going to shit,’ says Stevie. ‘I mean it should be just full of our own, not cunts in plastic shoes with fucking sparklers in their drinks.’ It’s a fair point, and one on which we all agree, resolving to give Greek Nicky a strong tug when he appears.

  ‘Where are the ladies?’ I then say, surprised to see that none of the wives are in attendance.

  ‘Powdering their fucking noses,’ says Danny. ‘They have to all go together, so they don’t get fucking lost on the way back.’

  After all agreeing with Danny’s light-hearted observation, the four of us then raise our glasses to pledge our toast of allegiance in a chorus of, ‘Never above ya! Never below ya! Always by ya side!’ It’s total bollocks of course, but somewhat reassuring.

  ‘Billy, while we’re on the subject, help us out with this one,’ says Stevie, as soon as we’ve finished our toast. ‘Me and Frankie’s just wagered a long ‘un. You know that song, ‘Why must I be a teenager in love?’ Who done it? I reckon it was Oscar Wilde, Frankie reckons it was Marty Wilde.’

  ‘It was actually Dion and the Belmonts or Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers,’ I tell them. ‘Mind you, if they threw Oscar Wilde in the slammer for fucking young boys up the arse, they should also give Marty Wilde a bit of bird for fucking up a great rock and roll song.’ But there’s no time for Frankie and Stevie to wrap their Cro-Magnon skulls around the answer to their question, because it’s off. Right out of the fucking blue, as always happens. No sooner has my last statement gone sailing over my firm’s heads, when one of the three ice-creams drinking at the far bar, has goosed Danny’s missus on her way back from the toilets. And in the time it takes to shake a pissy knob dry we’re all over them. Danny first, smashing a broken bowl-glass into the gooser’s right eye. As the sharp edge of the glass pierces the soft tissue around his retina, a loud squelch can be heard, and the gooser screams like a baby before dropping like a stone to the floor, clutching at what’s left of his eye. As Danny then starts to pulp the gooser as if he were of no more consistency than an orange, his pals, rightly sussing that th
ey’re well out of their depth, attempt to leg it out of the club, only to find that the place is too dark for them to see properly, and they end up crashing over an empty table, after which me, Frankie and Stevie cop for the pair of them and spend the next couple of minutes stomping, punching and kicking their pointless fucking heads in.

  And as they cower, screaming under the maelstrom of a ferocious beating, I suddenly come alive, lost in the moment of glorious violence as all my current anger and bitterness flows forth, manifesting itself in an uncontrolled psychopathic fury, meted out to two soft-as-shit straight-goers who are screaming for their mummies, and who, after we’ve finished with them will be incapable of holding down a steady job or even walking in a straight line ever again. You can’t beat dishing out a beating. I mean shooting someone’s OK. Makes the headlines and moves you up the criminal ladder tenfold, but it’s too cold and calculating to truly sate a criminal’s venomous instincts. Because as soon as you pull the trigger, all your hatred stays in your trigger finger, leaving the bullet to do all the dirty work. It’s a cheap way out really, and renders the whole experience of retribution somewhat emotionless and unsatisfactory. But with a good old-fashioned hiding, there’s that prehistoric connection of bone crushing bone. So I’m having a swinging old time, pumping out the poison that courses through my veins, like a polluted river running through an abandoned steel town, and just because I’m a horrible cunt to boot, the louder the screams from the ice-creams, the harder fall the blows. But still it ain’t enough. It never is. So, in a split second of giddy inspiration, I grab hold of a handy looking art deco soda syphon, smash it in two against the side of the bar, and then with the force of thunder, crunch the top part’s jagged edges down into the crown of one of the ice-creams’ head. You know the crown, it’s that bit on a baby’s head that’s so soft you can push your finger through, as if it were an overripe avocado, and that even in adulthood remains the softest part of the skull. And the force of my strike is such that the top of the soda syphon penetrates at least a quarter of an inch deep into the ice-cream’s skull and stays put, causing the silly cunt to fall back against the bottom of the bar unconscious, and looking like he’s pissed and wearing one of those silly hats you get out of Christmas crackers.