Bent

by Joe Thomas

  He's got two options, he reckons -

  The first is to tell Police Constable John Bryan Legge and Police Constable Alan David Wells exactly what it is that he suspects will occur this evening around the Phoenix club. He could do that as Legge and Wells are the two aides to CID working that evening and they will be posted at the Phoenix, the eyes and ears for CID.

  The second option is to not tell Legge and Wells exactly what it is that he suspects will occur this evening around the Phoenix club. He’ll do that, as although they are the two aides to CID working that evening and will be posted at the Phoenix, the eyes and ears for CID, Challenor does not know these two lads. In fact, these two lads have been attached to West End Central for less than a week, and have had no dealings with Challenor. Challenor's not even sure he's met them.

  So, he wonders -

  He wonders what to do.

  *

  ‘Who dares, eh, Tanky? Three sets of explosives, three trains.’

  Tojo speaks. Finally.

  ‘Who dares, sir. Quite right.’

  Tojo nods. He's leading the way along a pretty little ridge, and it really feels like you might be the only two people in the world right now, it does —

  ‘Were OK for food and drink for a few days but it’ll be worth figuring a friendly village or, better still, a friendly farm where we can stop to stock up,’ Tojo says. ‘There's the operational float, so we can offer something for it.’

  ‘You didn’t give any to the last lot?’ you say.

  ‘I tried to,’ Tojo says.

  You nod. You’re not surprised.

  ‘Sir,’ you say.

  ‘Yes, Tanky.’

  ‘How about we, well, how about we spend a little of that float on a, well, you know, on a drink or two.’

  Tojo keeps walking, keeps scanning left and right. You’re travelling during the day in the higher ground which seems safe, but you never do know, after all, do you?

  ‘You want us to have a drink-up, Tanky?’

  ‘Well- ’

  ‘As a celebration, a job well done, do you mean?’

  ‘I-’

  ‘Is there anything else you fancy?’

  You think, fuck it, why not. ‘Well, sir, we could always look for a bit of the other too, couldn’t we?’

  Tojo laughs. Tojo stops teasing you. He calls out over his shoulder, ‘I don’t think you need my help for that, Tanky.’

  You smile. To be fair, all you really want is to wake up without any danger of finding yourself peering down the barrel of a rifle.

  *

  Challenor decides that he's not going to tell Police Constable John Bryan Legge and Police Constable Alan David Wells exactly what it is that he suspects will occur this evening around the Phoenix club.

  Let's let this unfold natural like, Challenor thinks.

  Yes, that's the badger. He’ll sit tight and, you know, what's the word, he’ll pull strings, he’ll orchestrate. He’ll puppet-show the whole business.

  Yeah, he thinks, I’m not going to tell Legge and Wells exactly what it is that I suspect will occur this evening around the Phoenix club, at a little after 11 p.m. Before midnight, certainly.

  Challenor thinks it best he's behind the scenes on this one.

  What are you going to do about it?

  *

  You walk and you walk, you trudge and you hike, you march and you march —

  You follow the sun, you keep to the high ground.

  Two days of this and your bag of ham and sausage and bread and wine is almost empty.

  You look at maps and you look at landmarks and you reckon you’re more or less slap bang in the middle of a rough square formed by Villafranca, Bologna, Pisa and Florence.

  You spot a village down on the western side of the Apennines. You swoop high around it, hoping to find a quiet farm outside.

  You’re not sure of the date, you’ve no idea of the day, and you’ll take your chance. This, you understand, is gruelling. You understand this word, now.

  You head up the track to the farm and are confronted by a huge, terrifying dog, all lethal-looking yellow teeth, all snarl, all snap. The sort of dog who’d chew his own leg off if he's hungry enough.

  Your hand drifts to your Schmeisser —

  That dog ain’t going to take you by the throaty oh no it bloody ain’t. You’re well aware of your own jugular, and you’re hanging on to it, thank you very much.

  Tojo has his hands out front, keeping the dog — and you — calm, it appears.

  You’re frozen, the pair of you, and the dog doesn’t seem to want to actually get stuck in. What now?

  Then, a broad-hipped woman, thirtyish, dark hair, tasty-looking, calls off the dog. She's flanked by a couple of hefty farmhands.

  ‘Tedesci?’ She asks. German?

  Tojo shakes his head. ‘Inglesi.’

  She nods. She comes closer. She has beautiful eyes.

  She leads you to a barn filled with hay bales. She and Tojo have a long and faltering conversation. Her husband was in the Italian army and died in the Western Desert. She runs the farm with her two lads. She hates Germans.

  She leaves you and you get comfortable and then she's back with plates of pasta and sausage and bread and ham, and wine, lots of wine.

  As she refills your glass, you say, Belli occhi.’ Beautiful eyes. You’ve learned something. Actually, you’ve learned a couple of things, the way she takes the compliment.

  She clears your plates and glasses.

  Tojo stretches out and falls asleep after the meal.

  You sit outside the barn, cleaning your guns —

  There she is. You wave. She waves. You walk down towards her.

  It's dusk. The sky bleeds orange-red. The crisp autumn air snaps as the sun goes down.

  ‘Cattiva Maria.’

  Naughty Maria, you’re saying, and then you’re on the ground and you’ve her in your hands above you, and she has you in hers, and you’re kissing and she rolls off and under you and the warmth and the hunger and the sheer bloody wonder and the out-and-out relief, pleasure, sensation of this moment —

  In the dark you walk her back and then you return to the barn and Tojo wakes up and asks where the bloody hell you’ve been and you tell him you thought you heard something, and he says is everything all right and you say yes, sir, everything seems to be in order, couldn’t be better, you say.

  And you’re bloody well right about that.

  Tanky

  A few years after my grandad passed on, I started to understand the magnitude of what he’d done — what they’d done. I’d look at a blue photo album he put together. It records their days training in Scotland, blowing up road blocks in France, helping liberate Norway, passing through the rubble of Hamburg in 1945, and the lazy days immediately after: swimming, sunbathing, these impossibly young-looking, fit-looking, relaxed-looking lads. Every time I look at this blue photo album, I well up a touch, have a bit of a cry. Sometimes it's about knowing how much older I am now than they were then. I’ve never really understood why I feel it, but there's an inadequacy that pops up too, as if how dare I have any problems in the face of what they did. But I know my grandad wouldn’t wish some of what he saw, and did, on his worst enemy — on his actual enemy, in fact - that he’d do anything for me and my brother never to have to do what he did.

  He always said that SAS was knowing the Germans were there - and knowing they didn’t know you were. That was the advantage of being elite. Makes sense.

  In that blue photo album, there's a snap of two young, muscular fellas holding up a Nazi flag, looking at it quizzically, both got Woodbines in their gobs. It's in Hamburg. There are ruins all around them.

  They’re standing in front of a jeep, and on the front of the jeep's spare tyre which sits on the grill in front of the engine, is painted, in white, the words:

  Little Tanky

  The lad on the right is grinning, his beret at a jaunty angle, I suppose is how you’d describe it. His short sleeves are
rolled up, better to accentuate his biceps, his forearms. The lad to the left is dressed more neatly, hand on hip, proudly bearing this Nazi flag. My grandad has written their names under the photo:

  Cas Carpenter and Tanky Challenor

  There's a bunch of photos of lads lounging around in jeeps in Hamburg, mocking the flags they’ve pilfered, or examining them, or simply indifferent to them, the flags just there, in the shot, barely noticeable, and the lads are simply enjoying a rest and a smoke. Each photo is inscribed:

  Freddie Baines and Will Fyffe

  Pouch Maybury and ‘Umbriago’

  Larry Brownlee and Paddy McCann

  Sammy Harrison and Jake Manders

  Cas Carpenter and Tanky Challenor

  My eye always strays to the photo of Tanky - the lunatic looks about twelve years old. And there he is, with his jeep, his pride and joy: Little Tanky.

  Four

  ‘It's that bastard Gardiner; he's grassed on us. It's a nice club he's got. If he charges me, he won’t have it for long.’

  Challenor's marching down the corridors of West End Central, the Mad House, he's really marching, stamping, he is, stampeding down the corridors of the nick, his nick, his Mad House, his boots clicking and thumping as he marches, as he stamps -

  And he's wearing a grin bigger than a soldier's in a Mediterranean bordello, two days into leave.

  It has all, he is very happy to admit, gone according to plan. It has all gone exactly according plan. Clockwork, it's gone, bloody smooth as. Smooth as bloody Yank silk stockings, it's gone, and Challenor is having his little pace around his nick to calm down a touch, to get his bonce straight and his mug right as they’ve got Riccardo Pedrini and Alan Cheeseman in the cells downstairs and Challenor is very keen, eager he is, itching to have a word with these two and start wrapping up this little nonsense once and for all.

  Wells and Legge have got Cheeseman and Pedrini downstairs and Challenor's plan has gone very well indeed. It was, he reflects, quite a good idea not to tell these young police constables exactly what it was that he suspected would occur earlier this evening around the Phoenix club. Now, he hopes, the next stage of his plan will unfold with quite the same symmetry and inevitability.

  Inevitable, yes, he thinks, that's what it was -

  Inevitable.

  Better inevitable than predictable, that's for sure. Something old Tojo used to say, something old Tojo referred to once in terms of narrative, in terms of plot, that it was better for something to be inevitable than predictable. Course, he was comparing their Italian exploits to the workings of a novel, a thriller, but Challenor reckons the comparison stands its ground, is fair enough.

  Good old Tojo.

  Challenor reaches the cells. The charge room is empty now. On the table -

  Cheeseman's possessions and Pedrini's possessions -

  Challenor examines them. He examines the document that records the confiscation of the possessions of arrested men, a list. It's unsigned. Challenor's not sure. He thinks for a moment. He's not messing about, Challenor, and he knows what to do.

  He knows.

  Challenor barrels down the corridor, either side of which are the cells, the famous Mad House cells. Most of these famous Mad House cells are empty, he notices. Two of them, down at the end of this corridor, are showing No Vacancies, Challenor can see by the red lights on above the doors.

  Outside these two cells are Police Constable John Bryan Legge and Police Constable Alan David Wells.

  Challenor decides that he’ll talk to Wells.

  ‘Wells,’ he barks. ‘With me.’

  Challenor turns on his heel. Challenor spins, windmills around, doesn’t stop for a second, he windmills around, he does, with no loss of momentum and storms off back towards the charge room. He doesn’t look back or wait for Police Constable Alan David Wells, but he can feel him there behind him, trying to keep up, trying and failing to keep up with Challenor's bustle, his head-down charge for the charge room, a bull with a tense neck and a serious face on for a herd.

  Challenor throws open the door of the charge room and turns to face his aide. He looks at the table which holds the possessions of the two arrested men. He looks at Police Constable Alan David Wells.

  ‘Wells,’ he says. ‘Cheeseman's?’

  Wells indicates.

  ‘Right,’ Challenor says. ‘And he admitted to this, did he?’ Challenor's pointing at a flick knife.

  Wells looks unsure for a moment. Wells's eyes flash doubt, just for a second.

  ‘Well, Wells?’ Challenor says, with a smirk.

  Wells nods, nods furiously. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And these are Pedrini's?’ Challenor asks, pointing at the other collection of possessions.

  Wells is sure of this, and confident now, he is, onto a winner here, he feels. ‘Yes, sir,’ he says, emphatically.

  ‘And this,’ Challenor says, picking up a piece of iron tubing, ‘he admitted to this, did he?’

  Wells looks unsure again. ‘I might need to ask - ‘

  Challenor raises his eyebrows.

  Wells shakes his head. ‘No, I mean, yes, sir, yes, those are all Pedrini's possessions.’

  Challenor's nodding. ‘Sign here,’ he says, pointing at the document on the table that records the confiscation of the possessions of arrested men.

  Wells has learnt something here, and he doesn’t hesitate, signs with a flourish, in fact, Challenor spots. Quite a flourish, he's got, young Wells, with that pen there.

  ‘Thankyou, Wells,’ Challenor says. ‘You can jog on, now.’ Challenor smiles. As you were. Send Legge down here to see me, if you will.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Wells says.

  Challenor waits. Challenor stands and waits, nodding, grinning, tapping his foot. One quick word here with young Police Constable John Bryan Legge and Bob's your uncle and all that jazz, and here we fucking go -

  ‘Sir?’ Legge's head is in the doorway.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Challenor says, shooing him in the door.

  Legge stands straight and tall.

  Challenor is waving the document that Wells has recently signed with such a flourish. ‘Check this please, Legge,’ he says.

  Legge takes a look at the document. Legge reads the list of possessions, scans the list, scans it quite carefully, Challenor reckons, and his face changes, a touch, not more than a flicker, as he reads it, but it definitely changes, once or twice. Legge looks at the table. Legge looks back at the list. Legge looks at the table again, and then, again, he looks back at the list, he studies the list.

  ‘Well?’ Challenor asks, all friendly now, helpful. ‘All look about right?’

  Legge is nodding. ‘Yes, sir. It does.’

  Challenor smiles. ‘Good lad,’ he says. ‘Countersign, would you?’

  Legge countersigns and leaves, sharpish.

  Challenor smiles. Challenor grins.

  *

  ‘So what you’re telling me, Tanky,’ Tojo is saying, over a coffee and a smoke the morning after, ‘is that you’ve gone and bedded our hostess within about an hour of us pitching up, as it were.’

  You both chuckle.

  ‘Yes, sir, I suppose so, ‘you say. ‘Not sure “bedding” is quite the right term, though.’

  ‘I didn’t take you for a pedantic one, Tanks.’

  ‘Eh, sir?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’ Tojo smokes. Tojo smirks. ‘I suppose it was inevitable.’

  ‘Inevitable, sir?’

  ‘She's a widower, her husband's death Jerry's fault, were here to rescue her, effectively, and you’re a likely looking young buck.’ He smiles. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Inevitable. Or predictable.’

  ‘What's the difference?’ you ask.

  Tojo laughs. ‘If it's inevitable, it's heroic.’ He pauses, nods, he likes that, does Tojo. ‘And if it's predictable, it's cheap. Yeah. That's the difference.’

  Good old Tojo.

  ‘Definitely inevitable then, sir,’ you say.

  And t
he pair of you have a good laugh —

  And it's about bloody time, you think.

  *

  Cheeseman first.

  Challenor stomps down the corridor, the corridor lined with empty cells, stomping, snorting, smashing his way down this corridor to the two cells that have red lights on above their doors -

  He points at the door to one of these cells and Police Constable John Bryan Legge takes a fat bunch of keys and opens the door.

  Challenor doesn’t so much enter the cell as invade it. It must feel, to its occupant, that Challenor has had to narrow his considerable frame to fit through the cell door, that he may, in fact, have had to smash his way in sideways. The cell, with Challenor in it, suddenly feels especially inadequate. There is not enough cell is the impression that Challenor aims for when he inflicts himself on this, or any other, tiny, inadequate cell.

  ‘Cheeseman,’ he says. ‘You know who I am.’

  Cheeseman nods.

  Challenor says, ‘We’ll be charging you with possession, at least. You might as well get used to that.’

  ‘Possession of what?’

  Challenor smiles. Poor young lad. How old is Cheeseman? About twenty?

  ‘Don’t take the mickey,’ Challenor says, ‘you’ll only get me angry.’

  Challenor steps further into the cell and slaps Cheeseman, hard, open-handed, and then again, also hard, this time back-handed.

  Cheeseman recoils, bends over. It's the shock as much as the pain, Challenor thinks of telling him. He doesn’t tell him. Instead, he lifts Cheeseman's head by the hair. He pulls Cheeseman's not unattractive face towards his own. Cheeseman's not unattractive face is reddening on both sides. Is going quite puce, Challenor sees.

  Challenor pulls the flick knife that was not long before on the table in the charge room. He opens this flick knife.

  In one hand he holds Cheeseman's head, looks into the eyes of his not unattractive face; in the other hand, he holds Cheeseman's flick knife, Cheeseman's open flick knife. The knife is not a considerable distance from Cheeseman's throat.

  ‘I believe this is yours,’ Challenor says.

  Cheeseman shakes his head.

  Challenor breathes. Well, he snorts, really. He lets out a long breath, and its ferocity make a sort of snort, a growl.