“I came here to ask the questions, Buccola, not answer them.”
“All right, I’ll ask another easier question. How about this one? Did you know Alberto was Joseph’s nephew? His youngest sister’s youngest son, isn’t that correct, Joseph?”
“Yeah, that’s about right.” Lombardo’s eyes, something thrashing in the darkness of them. Glimmering like switchblades in moonlight.
“I don’t have the slightest fucking idea what you people are talking about.”
“You don’t? That’s strange, he was murdered today in his rooming house, shot to death, by a piece of shit looking a lot like you, we’re told,” Buccola said.
Frankie. Fantino. Alberto Fantino. Fuck!
Ben went to stand, Buccola and Lombardo leapt across the table and grabbed a wrist each, holding his arms fixed down firmly to the tablecloth.
Ben screamed “No!” High pitched. Loathing himself for it.
The Rat suddenly behind him, snapping something long and thin tightly over his head, around his throat. The rosary’d become a noose to hang him.
Ben bucked in the chair.
The chair legs danced and screamed echoes of Frankie’s death.
The Rat’s stinking, humid breath on his ear.
Strangled. Choked.
Expresso splashed across the table. Coffee spread into the white cloth like blood stains.
The heels of Ben’s shoes made sharp tap, tap, tap, tap sounds on the hard floor. Tap dancing into death ridiculously.
“Your boss Stefano is dead like his fucking brother and so are you, Detective!” Lombardo hissed through gritted teeth.
“I’m a fucking cop! A fucking cop!” Ben choked the words out. Rasping.
“Not no more, you ain’t. You’re a dead cop, you fuck!” Buccola grunted, laughed. The Rat snorted humid, rotten breath into his ear like a childhood secret.
Face burning, a balloon full of boiling blood about to burst. He sucked air.
Gasping. Choking.
Ants scurried over and around his vision. Filthy black dots growing grotesque in size. A harsh insectile buzzing in his ears. Rocking back and forth in the chair. Knees smashing into the underside of the tabletop. Crockery shook and chimed.
Ben wrenched his feet up, pushed hard against the table with all his remaining strength.
The chair fell back, Ben and the Rat tumbled hard to the floor together.
Gasping. Choking.
He kicked out, flailing, struggled towards the door.
Gasping air.
Rat Fuck pounced on his back; arms wrapped around Ben’s throat. Lombardo and Buccola barking in Italian. Ben tried to scream. Sucked air. Span around, stumbling backwards towards the plate glass window. Pushed back. Bucking. The Rat yelled out. The window exploded. Glass rattled, smashing to the stone sidewalk. Ben fell cruelly to the ground. His head struck the pavement. Dazed. Bit into his tongue to wake himself the fuck up. Blood ran hot into his eyes. The universe went a blood red.
Rat Fuck crouched groaning in broken glass like scattered ashes, holding his head in his hands. Ben fumbled, panting, stretching, grabbed at the largest shard of glass in his reach and swung it into the Rat’s back in between the shoulder blades. The shard snapped. The Rat screeched. Fell prone. Moaning. Crying. A blue automobile drove by slow. Ben glimpsed a pale child’s face in the back window staring as it swept past.
Struggling to his feet, holding his throat in his blood-sticky hands, Ben stumble-ran to the Cadillac. Wiping the blood from his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. Choking. Hacking. Coughing. He fumbled with the door handle. Gasping for air. Swung himself behind the wheel. Gasping. Stabbed the key into the ignition. Wheezing. Gunned the engine. Ripped the .38 from under his seat.
He pulled the car out hard, swerving in front of a Hudson. Horns blasted. Tires squealed. The Cadillac screamed down the street. He glanced back over his shoulder and spotted Lombardo kneeling over the Rat. Buccola out of sight.
As soon as he hit the freeway Ben relaxed. He took his finger off of the .38’s trigger and placed it carefully on the passenger seat. Exhaling deep. Wheezy. Swerved to the side of the freeway and sat sucking oxygen, hoarse, his head in his trembling hands.
He felt the strange weight of the envelope The Chief had given him in the inside pocket of his jacket. He pulled it out and ripped it open with trembling hands. Inside thirteen words scribbled on a white card. Thirteen. A fucking cursed number. Ben counting to seven to try and counteract the poison of the number as he read.
‘WORD FROM MULTIPLE INFORMANTS: THE DAGOS ARE MOVING ON YOU TODAY. BE READY.’
Fuck!!
Ben screamed himself mute, beating his fists into the steering wheel.
London, England
Sunday, February 21st, 1926
William still trembling, headache a rapture from Hell, jumped into a passing taxi and told the driver to take him to Gerrard Street, Soho and be quick about it. The driver mumbled and William tried to settle down into the cold leather seats, still not used to travelling by motorized vehicles. The vibrations, noise and petrol stink were jarring. Made him queasy. He made sure the driver was watching the road, then slipped the Webley revolver from his heavy tweed jacket, popped the cylinder and checked the load. He enjoyed the weight of the revolver in his hand. Reassuring. His lucky shooter. Not so lucky for the dead officer he’d taken it from over in France but lucky for him all the same. He was going to talk with the owners of a club on Gerrard Street, an Italian called Darby Sabini, who he detested. A dago who’d married a white Englishwoman and now pimped whores. The little man always dressed over extravagantly and surrounded himself with savages imported from Sicily. A cunt, but a dangerous one. The other owner was a woman, a jumped-up divorcee named Kate Meyrick. They’d sent word that protection payments were going to stop. An Italian and a woman. Could’ve been Jews. Chiseling every penny from the protection payments from the very beginning. Now they thought that because William had a little bother at the stationhouse, they could stop payments or pay someone else. William was going to tell the little dago bastard and that stuck up bitch in person, himself, that the cravat wearing son of a whore and the dyke had another think coming.
As they passed Hyde Park, he coughed up phlegm, wound down the window and spat it into the street. She was standing there. Her back to him again as though gazing out into the browns and faded greens of the winter park.
“Stop!” William shouted.
“Beg your pardon, Sir. I thought you were off to Soho.”
“Stop this fucking thing now!”
William jumped out of the taxi, wiping dribble from his chin.
“Sir! You need to pay the fare!” the driver called ou,t leaning over the front seats.
“Just bloody wait here a moment, won’t you? I think I saw an old friend of mine,” William said over his shoulder, making his way toward the ghostly figure, his hand grasping the revolver tightly in his pocket. He shoved his way through the foot traffic. Lost sight of her in a small, passing group and then glimpsed her again.
Golden hair hanging tangled down her back, catching the morning light dully. The filthy dress. Swaying slightly in the breeze. Mutt like growling crawled up from William’s chest and rumbled out of his throat. Uncontrollable. He’d not uttered those sounds from his lips since going over the top at the Somme. He clenched his jaw to stop himself from screaming. He was on her then, clenching his eyes shut, grabbing the little bitch’s arm and spinning her around.
“Well, I say!” an old lady shrieked. Hitting him in the face with a small fabric bag with a glass bottle inside that caught painfully at his brow. Her face the tint of a Royal Mail postbox. People stopped and stared.
“I’m sorry, Mam. Thought you were someone else.” He backed away from her. Bumping into someone else who shoved him hard away. “Watch where you’re bloody going, wino.” William fell to the damp ground, smacking his head on the cobblestones. The world span. The old lady still shrieking, “you’ll be sorry.”
> He got back up fast, rubbing at his head. Face burning. Stumbled back to the taxi. Glancing back. The hag smiling gap-toothed, corpselike.
He swung back into the auto-vehicle and told the man to drive. The woman’s shrill voice still pursuing him.
“You’re gonna be in so much trouble. In this life and the next one,” she hollered.
The growls escaping from his throat growing louder. Going over the top of the trenches in France. The shrieking of the officer’s whistle. The bombardments falling silent. He pressed his palms to his ears and shouted at the driver again. “Drive! Just fucking drive, man!”
The 43 Club had undergone numerous name changes, been closed down any number of times and Kate, the paddy ‘Night Club Queen’, had been jailed a sight lot more. There was very little about the woman William liked. Wouldn’t even have thrown her a fuck if she’d begged him for it. She’d appeared from nowhere. A rumor brought to life in Soho’s dancehalls. Started out as a partner running tea dances for social elites, spreading herself thin across London’s toff society. Opened a club, had it closed down. Aiding and abetting the sale of intoxicating liquor. Illicit alcohol. Opened another club had it closed down. Opened. Closed. Opened and closed. Playing games with The Met. Hide and seek. The woman wouldn’t quit, even had her kids serving drinks and checking coats in the clubs. Had uppity coloreds playing jazz and banging underage white girls. She had expensive tastes in all regards. William was expensive. He knew she never liked him and had brought that little dago bastard, Sabini, in to try and cheapen him. Complicate matters. He had the place raided in ’22 and ’24 when they’d last been late for payments. A friendly reminder that they only existed because he allowed them to exist. He was sure they were fucking each other. He wouldn’t put it past the woman to fuck a snake if she thought it would get her a step ahead. William Hughes wasn’t going to be outsmarted and bullied by a fucking bastard wop and a woman. Not a lot of things in life were a certainty, but William Hughes was a certainty that they both needed another reminder of.
The taxi coughed to a stop outside the unassuming, low key exterior of the club. William tossed a handful of coins on the backseat and told the driver to fuck off.
He stood outside, waving the taxi’s choking petrol fumes away and glanced around. Shook up. He’d been drinking too much, is all. Or drinking too little. The situation had pushed him to an edge. Seeing things. Nothing more, nothing less. Just stress. His father had been as crazy as a shithouse rat. Had hung himself with a belt from a beam in the attic. Perhaps lunacy was in the Hughes bloodline.
He twisted the end of his moustache thoughtfully, frowning, and checked out the area. Gerrard Street early morning bustling. People toing and froing from work. Ghosts. William’s fingers massaging the handle of the revolver in his pocket. Staring at the peeling green paint of the club’s walls and the window’s drawn natty, black curtains.
Sabini was a killer surrounded by killers. Fucking little monkeys that still lived in caves in their own countries. Self-doubt crawled into his mind. Wondered if he would see the outside again, the grey sky. But he chuckled, telling himself they didn’t have the gonads to take him out. He had to go into the place, yes, it was the principle of the whole blasted thing he thought, as he pushed upon the heavy wooden doors and stepped into the darkness. A bastard wop and an upstart bitch in heat weren’t going to better him. Didn’t even need the money really. Hadn’t needed it for a very long time. He’d just become addicted to the feeling he got in his nuts when people handed over the cash with that pathetic, helpless look slapped all over their faces. The same way he felt when he took a whore off the street to the courtyard in Brick Lane. He always took what he wanted. Hell to pay for those who tried to blue ball him. Yes, just on edge was all. Seeing things. Stress, it made people sick. He wasn’t going to let them pull his pants down and bend him over. He was William Hughes, he’d survived the workhouses, starvation, disease, the trenches and guns in that fucking war. No, he wasn’t going to be outdone by those two upstart cunts.
The interior stank like an upper-class whorehouse and was pitch black except a purple light that trickled through the dark curtains like a blackeye on the face of a flower girl. He slipped the revolver from his jacket pocket and held it out at the hip as he made his way through the darkness of the entrance towards the main hall, where a woman’s laughter leaked from. His eyes adjusting to the dim. Left arm outstretched into the darkness. Thought he felt a woman’s breath on his face for a moment. Swallowed the whining that tried to pounce from his jaws. Passed the cloak room with empty hangers dangling from empty racks. Gallows. A seeping white light spreading like moonlight across mahogany fixtures and oriental wallpaper.
Sabini and Kate both turned to look at him from the center table they were seated at as he stepped into the main hall. Frozen still like people having their photograph taken or criminals caught in the middle of a crime. He slid his back against the wall and gave the room a close once over, the revolver still clasped at his hip.
“Oh really, Billy? Must you always make such entrances?” Kate laughed, silk glove to her lips. “Come and have a nice cup of tea. You can stir it with your little gun.”
“You would probably prefer me to come in here with just my prick in my hand, wouldn’t you?”
“No, not particularly, Billy darling. It’s not vaudeville we do here, you know.”
The bitch winked at Sabini. Sabini smirked.
“Shut your tart mouth. And I told you, it ain’t Billy.”
“Come and sit down, William. We have a little business to discuss, yes?” Sabini patted the empty chair at the white clothed table. “And put the shooter away for goodness sake. We aren’t all primitives.”
“Aren’t we?” William said, but slid the Webley back into his jacket pocket, his hand not leaving the smooth pearl handle. He strolled over to the table. The sounds of his black oxfords on the dancefloor echoing like drumbeats.
“Why do you two have the foolish notion that you aren’t gonna pay me? I want my money and I want it now.”
“Don’t loom over us like that, silly Billy. Do sit down.” Kate sipped at her tea, pinky finger erect in the air.
Sabini pulled a face and shrugged. Twisting the end of his finely trimmed mustache.
“Forever discussing money. Rather uncouth, old chap. Manners are quintessentially British, yes?” Sabini poured himself another tea from an intricate china teapot, spooned in sugar.
“I’ll not be told how to behave by a cave dwelling bastard dago,” William said, pulling the chair a few feet from the table and sitting down.
Sabini’s eyes glimmered dark, he flashed a shit-eating grin.
“Darby dear, this repartee does rather stink. Let’s just get on with business briskly, shall we? I have an appointment with a Lord at eleven. However, before we proceed, I must excuse myself to use the powder room.”
Sabini swallowed, nodded, reached across the table and patted Kate’s gloved hand delicately.
“Yes, my dear,” he said, standing up. William stood up too. Not to be outdone by this fucking little monkey costumed in finery and jewelry. Kate stood and bowed. Held eye contact with Sabini too long. Avoided William’s gaze as he sat back down. It was then that he knew he wasn’t going to leave the 43 Club alive.
He watched Kate move across the dance floor, her heels tapping out morse code of a heartbeat, dress moving whisp-like, disappearing through a red door behind Sabini. William’s hand against the revolver soaking wet. He pushed his chair further from the table, scanning the empty dance hall, the vacant stage.
“You’re out, William. I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not. It’s been a long time coming. Too long, in fact,” Sabini said wiping his hands on a napkin. Screwing it up into a ball and dropping it onto the floor.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“We don’t need you anymore and frankly we’re quite relieved. I’ve killed many men. Slit a man’s throat with a straight razor when I was but a boy.
Eleven years old. He was the local butcher and he had been molesting my sister. I take no satisfaction from the killing of another human being. I’m certainly no saint, but you, William, you’re truly repulsive. A rapist. A killer driven to kill for his own demented desires. You’re a sick twisted man and you are of no use to us anymore.”
William chewed at his bottom lip, pinched at the creases in his trousers, “I’ll have this club raided and smashed to pieces before dinner time tonight.”
“No, William. You won’t. You won’t do anything of the sort, Old Chap. You see someone more powerful than you has reached out to Kate and me. Offered us a deal, and it’s a far better deal, I’m afraid to say.”
“Horse shit.”
“Is it? You don’t have a single friend in the whole wide world, William. You’re alone. Suspended from the MET, you have no power here. Not anymore. This new partnership we have with your Superintendent suits us so much better,” he smiled faux-glum, sighed.
“Harewood? That’s absolute horse shit. You’re fucking bluffing, Sabini.”
“There was one condition to the deal, however,” Sabini croaked, pulling his own revolver from his jacket and pointing it rigidly across the table.
Footsteps from the far end of the dance floor. Two sets of heavy footfalls. William peeped two thick silhouettes creeping behind him in a mirrored wall. A bead of sweat slid from his temple to the corner of his lips, and he licked it away. Clucking his tongue.
“Do you like fucking, Darby?” William grinned, picking up the teapot and pouring himself steaming tea with his free hand.
“I beg your pardon.” Sabini said, the revolver wavering slightly in his fist.
“I said, do you like fucking? Because that shooter I came in with is now underneath the table pointing at your little dago bollocks.”
Sabini swallowed audibly. Waved a hand slowly out in the air. Stay back. The footsteps behind William stopped.
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