Billy Rags

by Ted Lewis

  I walked to the bar and got a drink and waited for them to come to me. They didn’t move for a while. They were playing the same game. After three or four minutes one of them left his seat and came over to the bar and stood behind me. I could tell he was behind me because of his aftershave.

  “Evening,” he said.

  I turned round and looked at him. He was grinning at me, but I didn’t like the grin. It was arrogant, full of condescension.

  I nodded in reply.

  “You must have missed us,” he said. “We’re over in the booth.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” I said.

  I walked past him and over to the booth and sat down. The other one watched me all the way. This one wasn’t grinning but the same arrogance and conceit were there.

  The first one slid into the seat, next to me.

  There was a silence.

  “I’m Vince,” said the first one. “And this is Dave.”

  I nodded again.

  “And you’re Billy,” said the one called Dave.

  I didn’t answer.

  “And you want to work,” he continued.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  There was another silence.

  “Jimmy tell you what we’re on?” Vince said.

  “Yes.”

  “All we want,” said Dave, “is some extra muscle.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Five minutes’ work, really.”

  I waited.

  “Thing is, for five minutes, we can’t count you in on the divvy. I mean, we’ve been sorting this one for a couple of months now.”

  “See what we mean?” Vince said. “We’ll be glad to give you the work. But as to the divvy . . .”

  “Did Jimmy tell you I’d expect to be in on the divvy?” I said.

  “No, but . . .”

  “Then the conversation we’re having’s pointless, isn’t it?”

  “Just wanted to make sure you understood our position,” said Dave.

  “Fine,” I said. “Now you understand my position: I’m working for a grand. Half first, half after. No ifs, no buts. Just tell me what needs doing and I’ll do it. But leave out the lip and leave out the clever glances and on Wednesday evening you’ll both be a lot better off. Thanks to me. Because you two couldn’t knock over my Auntie Nora’s karsi on your own. And she’s been dead ten years.”

  I took a sip of my drink. They both looked at me. After a little while Dave said: “We don’t need you, cunt.”

  I smiled at him.

  “Then why am I here?”

  “We’re doing a favour for Jimmy.”

  “Don’t make me tired,” I said. “You’ve never done anybody a favour in your life. You need me. You can’t get any of the pros to work with you. It’s plain as day. You’re only getting me because I want out of my present situation. You’re just a couple of wankers. Without me you don’t stand a snowball’s chance.”

  “Listen, clever sod,” Dave said, “there isn’t only you, you know. There’s two other geezers in on it. You’re just insurance. One more isn’t going to make all that much difference.”

  “If it’s me it will,” I said. Vince began to speak but I cut him off. “Look, is it on or isn’t it? Otherwise I can think of other places to do my drinking.”

  They looked at one another. Dave said:

  “What makes you think we can put the bread up front?”

  “Oh, you can,” I said. “Couple of affluent lads like yourselves. You’ll be able to manage that.”

  “Supposing we don’t want to?”

  “Then you don’t want me, do you?”

  There was another silence.

  “Are we having another drink, or what?” I said.

  Dave looked at Vince. Then he nodded.

  Vince got up and went to the bar. Neither of us spoke until Vince got back with the drinks. When Vince sat down I said: “The other two you mentioned. They know I’m in it?”

  “Not yet,” Vince said.

  “Who are they?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “I said who are they?”

  “George Fulcher and Mickey Reeve.”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t know either of them.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t, would you,” Dave said.

  I looked at him.

  “Well, you know what I mean,” he said.

  I left it and took a drink.

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me all about it.”

  “Nothing to tell,” Vince said. “It’s a doddle. Just a Post Office van. Ram and scram. Two cars, one posted on the route, one following the van. Once we’ve stopped the van we take the stuff in the second car, drive two streets and get into the straight cars.”

  “A doddle,” I said. “I’ve been on doddles before.”

  “What can screw it up?”

  I scratched my head.

  “Well?” said Vince.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  I finished my drink.

  “And you want me to supply some muscle,” I said.

  “You and the other two. Dave and me’ll concentrate on the rear doors.”

  “Which car am I in?”

  “The first one. The waiting car.”

  “I take it you don’t intend going tooled up.”

  “Tooled up? On this kind of job?”

  “Just so’s I know what I’m into,” I said.

  “Christ, we don’t want ten-stretches.”

  “I thought you were the types that were never going to get your collars felt. I thought that was just for old timers like me.”

  “Yeah, well. There’s always the possibility. I mean, you have to think of these things, don’t you?”

  I didn’t phone Sheila when I got back to the flat. I felt too tired and depressed.

  The two tearaways had put the mockers on me. Had I been like that ten years ago? Christ, I hoped not. I’d hate to have thought I’d been nicked as a result of being as stupid as they were.

  I made a cup of tea and put the pot and the milk on a tray and set it down on the bedside table and got straight into bed.

  The job had sounded straightforward enough. Even if they screwed it up I reckoned I could get myself out of it without concerning myself with them. And have the half a grand. But the whole thing seemed unreal to me. There was none of the old elation, no excitement at the prospect of action. Maybe the tearaways were right. Maybe I was an old man without any appetite.

  I drank my tea and switched out the light. Outside the distant sound of traffic drifted up into the sky. For some reason I thought of myself as a boy, lying in my bed just this way, listening to the noises of the outside world, wondering what was happening out there, inventing stories to fit the sounds of the night.

  “Sheila, it’s me.”

  “Billy, love. I thought something had happened . . .”

  “Nothing’s happened, sweetheart. Look, I think it’s time for us to get back together. I think it’ll be OK now.”

  “Billy, that’s marvellous.”

  “Yeah, well listen. I want you to go to this flat in Fulham. Now you’ll be followed, we know that, but don’t worry about it. Just go to the flat and go in. The door’ll be open. On the hall table there’ll be an envelope with the keys to the Mini and the address of where I’m living, right? Don’t bother reading it then. Just pick it up and go through the flat to the back bedroom window and out and down the fire-escape. You’ll be quite safe because there’s a courtyard that can’t be seen from the way you go in. Just cross the courtyard and there’s a passage under the flats behind, right? Go down the passage and the Mini’ll be opposite the pas
sage in the next street.”

  “What time shall I come to where you are?”

  “About seven o’clock tonight,” I said.

  We talked a little while before I put the phone down but I didn’t tell her about the job. I’d tell her about that tonight, in the flat, when it was over.

  I sat in the car and looked out of the window. The side street was empty. Next to me the driver, George, flexed and closed his hands over the steering wheel, regularly, monotonously. On the corner, about ten yards away from us at the end of the street, Mickey waited for the van to round the corner of the street that formed the junction to the street where we were parked.

  I looked at my watch. Approximately two minutes to go. I felt the pick-handle that lay across my knees. Above us light fluffy clouds drifted across the deep blue sky.

  Then, at the end of the street, Mickey turned and began to walk towards us. George and I pulled on our stocking masks. George slid off the handbrake and the Jaguar began to move forward. I leant back over my seat and opened the back door for Mickey. Mickey got in and George put his foot down.

  “She’s here,” said Mickey, putting on his mask. “Vince and Dave are right behind her.”

  George swung the Jag round the corner and there it was, the Post Office van, trundling down the empty street towards us, the Dormobile in tow right behind.

  They must have known. The minute the Jag pulled out, they must have known. But there was nothing they were going to be able to do about it.

  George wrenched the wheel over and pulled the Jag broadside on in the path of the van. The driver of the van pulled on his wheel, too, but there was no chance. The van hit the Jag between the nearside front door and front wheel. The Jag twisted round, carried on the path of the van, but came to rest when the van ploughed into the side of the empty warehouse. Almost before the van had stopped we were all out of the Jag, making for the driver and his mate. I heard the sounds of Vince and Dave going to work on the van’s rear doors.

  George and Mickey took one of the front doors. I took the other. As I pulled it open and yanked out the driver I saw his mate anticipate the door opening on the other side: he kicked out at the door with both feet. I heard George cry out as he got the full force of the door in his face, but Mickey grabbed the legs of the mate and pulled him out of the cab so that his head cracked against the bottom of the doortrip and again on the pavement.

  My one was easy. I didn’t even use the pick-handle. I just dragged him out and slung him against the side of the van and gave him a couple round his head and he sank to the floor, no fight in him. I left him where he was and ran round to the back of the van. Vince and Dave had got the doors open and were already shifting the sacks into the Dormobile. I began to help them. Mickey appeared from the other side of the van, supporting George. George’s mask was soaked with blood. Mickey pulled the mask from George’s head and almost immediately George sank down to his knees and was sick. The blood was still pouring from his nose.

  “Get him in the back, quick,” Vince shouted at Mickey. “You’ll have to drive now.”

  Mickey got George to his feet and shepherded him round to the back of the Dormobile and bundled him in.

  “Right, that’ll do,” Dave said. “Let’s get going, sharp.”

  The driver began to get up.

  Mickey got in the driver’s seat and Dave got in beside him. Vince and I got in the back with George. Mickey reversed the Dormobile and began to swing it out so that we could get past the Jag.

  “What did I tell you,” shouted Vince over the noise of the engine. “A doddle! A fucking doddle!”

  I looked through the rear window. There was a car rounding the corner behind us.

  It began to slow down. Then it stopped. The driver got out and ran halfway to the van and looked at the men lying in the road. Then he looked down the road towards the Dormobile.

  “We’re spotted,” I said.

  Dave twisted round in his seat. The man ran back to his car and got in and reversed back down the road until he got to a spot where he could turn round.

  “Fuck him,” Dave said. Then to Mickey: “Get moving, son, we’re red hot for the next couple of minutes if that bastard tips the law.”

  Mickey put his foot down. He turned right, then left, then left again. Now we were in a main thoroughfare. There was no other way to get to where the clean cars were parked. We only had to be on it for a couple of minutes, but now it was dicey, now we’d been spotted.

  The traffic couldn’t have been worse. Ahead of us, traffic lights were reducing the flow of vehicles to a snail’s pace. Pedestrians were moving faster than we were.

  “Fucking Jesus,” Vince said. “Let’s bleeding move it.”

  The traffic ahead of us started up and we moved a few more yards before stopping again.

  In the opposite lane, traffic going in the opposite direction was flowing much more easily.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Dave said. “Make a U-turn.”

  “That’ll take us away from the cars,” said Vince.

  “We can make it another way. Let’s for Christ’s sake get off this street. We’re like fish in a barrel.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Mickey said.

  “Make the bleeding turn.”

  Mickey threw the van into reverse to give him the space to begin the turn. But as he did that the lights changed and the traffic began to move again.

  The car behind went straight up the Dormobile’s arse.

  “You fucking idiot,” screamed Dave.

  People on the pavement stopped, staring. The door of the car behind opened and the driver began to get out. Mickey screwed the steering wheel right over and pulled out into the opposite lane. A Cortina, travelling at about thirty, was headed straight for the nose of the Dormobile. The Cortina braked but it carried on skidding towards us. Dave and Vince screamed at Mickey. Mickey put his foot down and tried to complete the turn, get the van straight to avoid the Cortina, but instead of straightening up, the van mounted the pavement and ploughed into a news-stand. Magazines and papers scattered everywhere and slapped up at the front window.

  “You cunt!” Dave screeched.

  And as he screeched the Cortina hit us, shuddering the rear of the van along in its path until the Dormobile was almost pointing the way we’d been travelling in the first place.

  Dave and Mickey slid open their doors. I kicked at the rear doors and smashed them open and slid out over the sacks. Women were screaming and the traffic had stopped completely. I straightened up and found myself staring in the windscreen of the Cortina. The driver was lying back in his seat, stunned, blood pouring down his face. I ran round the corner of the van, on to the pavement, and collided with Mickey.

  “George,” he said. “Help George.”

  George had rolled out off the sacks and was leaning against one of the rear doors, looking round him as though he couldn’t quite comprehend what had happened. Mickey went to him and grabbed hold of George’s lapels and began to shake him.

  “Come on, George,” Mickey said. “Get a grip. We’ll get you out of it.”

  I looked down the street. Vince and Dave had already taken off, charging away from us down the pavement through the crowds of lunch-time shoppers. I looked at Mickey and George. There was nothing I could do by staying, other than to make sure three of us got nicked instead of just the two. So I took off after Vince and Dave. I ran along the pavement and above the racing wind I could hear Mickey’s voice screaming after me to go back.

  I didn’t know the area. I knew the name of the street where the cars were, but that was all. I had to stick with Dave and Vince if I wanted to make it by car. I could have stayed on my own, tried to make it alone, but making it by car was safer.

  Dave and Vince turned right before they got to the traffic lights. I did the sa
me and found myself in a side street similar to the one we’d been in earlier. Dave and Vince were about twenty yards ahead of me. The street was empty but for the three of us. Away in the distance I could hear the Hee-Haw of police cars. Dave and Vince took a left turn and again I followed. Then left and right again and we were there, in the street where the cars were parked.

  The street was a new development. Where there’d once been nineteenth-century workers’ dwellings and warehouses, now there were clean new flats down one side and a low modern school on the other. The cars, a Zephyr and a Rover, were parked twenty feet apart, facing in different directions, by the school railings. The playground was full of kids, chanting and running and playing.

  Vince reached the Zephyr and Dave carried on running towards the Rover. Vince got in and gunned the engine of the Zephyr. The car began to pull away from the curb. Dave was almost up to the Rover. Vince’s car accelerated towards the Rover but suddenly he slewed the car across the road and jammed on his brakes.

  A police van had rounded the corner of the school and manoeuvred itself broadside across the road.

  I stood stock still in the middle of the street. Vince jumped out of the Zephyr and began running back towards me. Uniforms began to pile out of the police van. Children were running towards the railings to get a better view. Dave was in the Rover by now and had started the engine. The Rover accelerated forward and made for the gap between the Zephyr and the railings. There was just enough space for the Rover to get through. Vince ran past me, careless of Dave’s Rover. Sheer panic was making Vince’s decisions for him.

  I ran towards the gap between the Zephyr and the railings. Dave would have to slow down as he went through the gap. If he stopped for a second I’d be able to get in. It was a chance I had to take. I’d get nowhere taking off like Vince.

  I stood poised by the boot of the Zephyr. Kids were crammed against the railings, eyes wide. One of the uniforms shouted to the kids to get back but they didn’t take any notice. The Rover mounted the pavement. But it didn’t slow down. I stared into the windscreen. Dave’s face was set with concentration. He was going to try and go through the gap without slowing down. I stepped out into the space and waved my arms at him. But the expression on Dave’s face didn’t change and the Rover didn’t slow down. He must have been doing fifty.