Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

It was still a bright, cold night and I found myself wishing for a wisp or two of the smog that had cloaked my city-crossing skulk the night of my escape. I guessed, however, that my getup and set of wheels were as good a disguise as I could have.

Stopping the Cresta out of sight, I tugged my cap’s peak down over my eyes, walked back to where I’d seen a late-night street vendor and bought an evening paper. Still nothing about me. I was beginning to find my lack of mention, however welcome, rather strange.

I took a slow drive along Broomielaw without stopping, checking out for any watching coppers or cars with their engines running, before doing a city block loop and coming back.

Larry Franks was doing his best to look casual, hanging on the corner across from the Paradise Club and smoking. I was on time, so I guessed he couldn’t have been waiting too long. He snapped a cigarette away into the street as he saw my second approach; I pulled up to the kerb.

‘The coppers give you that?’ he asked when he got in, nodding to the bruise on my face. I had hoped it would have faded, but it had simply changed tones: an identifying mark that would be with me for a week or so.

‘No, not the coppers,’ I said, looking in my rear-view mirror before driving off.

‘Nobody’s watching the club,’ he said. ‘And I really don’t think anyone’s tapped the telephone. The coppers aren’t taking the subtle approach. Jonny’s been hauled in three times and they’ve leaned on him pretty hard. But they’re doing the leaning because they’ve got nothing else now. He told me he owes you for that and wanted me to tell you he won’t forget it.’

I didn’t say anything. Having sentenced a man to death was not something I wanted gratitude for.

‘Jonny also knows all about your problem with the police. Like I said on the ’phone, a couple of coppers came in twice, asking for you. Turn here, over the bridge,’ said Franks. ‘I live in Newton Mearns. But you’d have guessed that already.’

I smiled. Newton Mearns was known locally as Tel Aviv on the Clyde. Jonny Cohen lived there as well.

‘These two coppers…’ I said, as we crossed the Jamaica Bridge and into the South Side. ‘Anyone you know?’

‘Never seen either of them before. One had an Englishy-type accent, which you don’t often hear in a Glasgow copper.’

‘But they showed you their warrant cards?’

‘Yeah… or more that they flashed them at me. But these boys couldn’t be anything other than coppers. You know the type.’

And I did. More specifically, I knew two in particular who were exactly the type. With Special Branch warrant cards.

‘So what did you find out on those names?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got more than the names for you,’ said Franks. ‘I’ll go over it all when we get back to my place. I’ve fixed up a bed in the spare room. I guess you’re looking for a place to lie low.’

‘The bed for tonight’s great, Larry, I appreciate it. But after that, I’ve got plans.’ I trusted Franks and I trusted Cohen more, but the barge was going to stay a secret between me and Twinkle. Who, bizarrely, I found myself trusting the most.

We spent the rest of the drive chatting, but I kept checking the rear-view mirror as we did so and was aware of Franks doing the same with the wing mirror.

Franks’s flat was in a newly built, boxy concrete horseshoe of apartments. It was right on the edge of Newton Mearns and, even in the dark, I could see the black clouds of silhouetted trees rolling across the landscape and into the distance. It was, for me, a uniquely Scottish thing: the way hard-edged, asphalt urbanism could come to a sudden stop and open landscape began, without any graduation between. It was the same phenomenon I’d experienced in the Lanarkshire mining village when I’d gone hunting for Frank Lang’s supposed birthplace.

Larry Franks’s flat was on the top floor of three and it was a nice place. Cool and calm, and somehow nothing like I had expected. Everything was clean and modern, including the Danish-style furniture; but it wasn’t the strident, clumsy modernity of the Dewars’ Dennistoun terrace. It was tasteful. And expensive: I guessed that Franks made more than a bob or two running the Paradise Club, and much of that income would not have been allowed to add to the taxman’s workload.

‘You hungry? I’m hungry,’ he said, and headed towards the kitchen. ‘Sit down and I’ll fix you a sandwich.’

I did what he said. I was hungry. Before he went into the kitchen, Franks poured two Scotches and handed me one. As I sipped it, I took in more of my surroundings. Everything new. This was what it was like, I guessed, not to have a history. To have to start everything again anew.

The only things that were of any kind of vintage were the photographs on the mantelpiece. Even they were in modern frames, but the photographs themselves were creased and one had a corner torn and missing. I guessed they were of family, but when Franks came back in from the kitchen, I didn’t ask. There were a lot of questions you didn’t ask of a man with a number tattooed on his forearm. Asking about his family was one of them.

He placed a plate on the G-Plan coffee table in front of me and I started to eat.

‘Cheese and ham?’ I asked disbelievingly.

‘Don’t you like cheese?’ he asked, grinning.

‘Cheese and ham’s fine by me. Now, what did you find out about those names?’

‘Well, all three are scam-merchants, like you say. But that’s like saying the guy who does the toilet signs for the Corporation and Michelangelo are both painters.’

‘So who’s the signpainter and who’s Michelangelo?’

‘Well, let’s put it this way, you were right to say Eddy Leggat was your best bet to find. Dennis Annan, or whatever name he uses now, is definitely the Michelangelo of long-firm fraud. He can spend years setting up a fraud and then makes a big hit. Eddy Leggat is the middleweight. The third guy on the list is small fry, and anyway he’s in prison.’

‘Does anyone know what Annan looks like?’

‘I don’t. I think Jonny’s maybe met him, but a long time ago. He isn’t your Frank Lang, or whoever the guy in the photograph was. Jonny would have recognized him.’

‘Have you got me anything on Leggat?’

Franks got up and went over to a low level oak bureau. When he came back he had a heavy envelope and a slip of paper in his hand. He handed me the note and I saw it had an address in Anniesland on it.

‘Anniesland?’ I asked incredulously. ‘The profits of long-firm fraud only get you as far as Anniesland?’

‘That’s where he is now. Recuperating.’

‘Recuperating?’

‘Recuperating… His last scam was a phoney travel agency business, taking cash directly from punters for bus tour holidays of the Lake District, Blackpool, that sort of crap. But his big score was selling tickets for a bogus trip to Lourdes for the genuflection set. Turns out one of the punters he ripped off was some old biddy with a bad back she wanted Our Lady to fix for her. An old biddy by the name of Murphy… as in her nephew, Hammer Murphy.’

‘Ouch…’

‘Yeah… ouch. I believe Leggat said that when Murphy and his boys came to visit. Over and over again.’

‘He doesn’t sound like he’s the mastermind of deception I’m looking for.’

‘It’s not what he knows, it’s who he knows,’ said Franks.

‘You said you had more than the names for me?’

‘That I have…’ He handed me the envelope and I opened it.

‘Shit…’ I said, bemused, when I saw the contents.

‘Travelling funds, Jonny said. Enough to get you out of the country and back to Canada. Enough to take the less conventional or obvious route.’

I looked at the swollen envelope. There was a couple of thousand in it, enough to buy all of the flats in the block.

‘Tell Jonny that I’ll return this, when everything is over.’

‘I got the impression it was non-returnable. Whatever happens.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ I said, and slipped the envelope into the pocket of the tweed jacket.

We finished our sandwiches and then another whisky. We sat and smoked and drank and Franks even made me laugh with some bad jokes. For the first time in days I felt like a normal guy with no worries.

He asked me if I wanted a coffee and I said yes, following him into the kitchen with my plate. The kitchen was like the rest of the flat: clean, tidy, efficient, all built-in and modern lines. Even the jumble of notes, calendar and photographs pinned to the cork notice board on the wall by the door seemed to have a kind of organization to it. He had a small espresso pot on the hob and I knew that I was going to taste real coffee for the first time in a long time.

‘Do you miss Hungary?’ I asked. He turned to me, as if surprised by the question.

‘Do you miss Canada?’

‘Every day.’

‘Well then. The difference is you rejected Canada instead of the other way around. That’s the difference between an emigrant and a refugee, I suppose. Hungary didn’t so much reject me as spit me out.’

He handed me my coffee and I turned to head back into the living room when I noticed one particular photograph, actually a press cutting, pinned to the cork board.

‘Larry…’ I said, the confusion obvious in my tone. ‘Why would you have a photograph of a Nazi pinned up in your kitchen?’

‘Oh… old Werner there?’ Franks laughed. ‘Werner’s my hero.’

I examined the picture again: a black and white head-and-shoulders image of a steel-helmed German infantryman. His eyes were bright and he had movie-star looks.

‘I’ll tell you something, Lennox,’ said Franks, ‘and I’m not crying for sympathy or any shit like that — but I saw some things, I’ll tell you. In the camps. Before the camps, and after. You either spend the rest of your life hating everyone because you know what they’re capable of, or you try to make sense of it and see some good in people.’ He took another sip of whisky and screwed up his eyes, lifting a finger from the glass to point it at me. ‘But if there’s one thing I learned, it’s this: no one is who he seems. Ever.’

He tapped the picture on the cork board with his free hand. ‘Take Werner here… good old blue-eyed, square-jawed, blond-haired, handsome-as-fuck Werner. This picture was taken for a Berlin newspaper and was titled “The Ideal German Soldier”. Goebbels or one of his monkeys cottoned on to it and Werner was plastered all over recruiting posters for the German army. This…’ he tapped the picture again, ‘was what all good Nazi Aryan soldiers should look like.’

‘I don’t — ’

Franks cut me off by wagging the finger extended from his glass. ‘The thing is, Werner was kicked out of the army in Nineteen-Forty. You know why? Because this particular Ideal German Soldier’s surname was Goldberg.’

‘Jewish?’ I looked at the photograph again.

‘Half. A Mischling, as the Nazis called them. So you see, no one is ever who they seem in this life. Good or bad. But I think you’re someone who already knows that. Jonny says you’ve been through a wringer or two yourself.’

I smiled, contemplating my Scotch. ‘I guess I have at that. The First Canadian had a shitty war — from Sicily all the way to Hamburg. And I’ve got mixed up in a lot of things since. Things I shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in. I’ve seen a lot of crap all right. I even once had to spend a weekend in Aberdeen.’

‘Shit…’ Franks affected mock shock and sympathy. ‘Aberdeen?’ He laughed. Franks was all right. We had another couple of snifters and I began to feel the world’s rotation on its axis so we called it a night and I crashed out in his spare room. I felt relaxed and tired and grateful.

But I tucked the automatic under my pillow, all the same.