Men from Boys

Geezers Brian Thompson

When his brother-in-law arrived, Harry Tolman was watching afternoon racing. From behind the curtains he studied Cliff locking the doors to his motor and then remembering his fags and having to open up again. Motor. Harry shrugged. Walk like that, talk like that: it was bred in the bone. Only the elderly said motor or fags these days. As if to prove his point an incautious movement of his arm produced that sudden jolt a junior doctor at the hospital had described to him as a deterioration of the brachial nerve. Or somesuch. He winced as he walked to let Cliffie in. The two men embraced without warmth.

‘Let me say, straight off and before everything else, how choked everbody still is about Jean,’ Cliff said. ‘Even now, even after all this time.’

‘Yeah, well.’

‘I tried to put into words how we all felt at the funeral, Harry, but you were out with the fairies that day and no mistake.’

‘If you say so,’ Harry said. He walked into the kitchen to make a pot of tea.

Jean, through her brother Cliff, had been his last connection to that wise-guy London thing and after she died he all too willingly let it drop. He had not been up the Smoke for a six-month and then only to drink at pubs where he knew he could not be recognised. Came home on the early evening train.

The seaside bungalow they stood in now was Jean’s choice of a nice place to live, just as the perennials in the flower borders were hers. Harry ate from plates she had chosen, slept under the duvet she had selected from the catalogue. Her clothes were still in the wardrobe. That was the story. She was his woman, he was her man.

That was the story and what the neighbours had not seen with their own eyes they invented. Harry Tolman was that nice man at 32 whose wife had died so suddenly. Kept himself to himself, had an unexpectedly flat belly and strong forearms, looked sixty, could be younger, could be older. A former soldier, perhaps. Politely spoken, but with that characteristic cockney croak. A one-time market trader, maybe.

Cliffie drummed his fingernails on the kitchen worktop. ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m here?’ he asked.

‘Let me guess. You’re in trouble.’

‘Big time. But I mean big time.’

Harry smiled to himself. ‘Now don’t get me all excited, Cliff.’

‘My hand to God,’ his brother-in-law muttered.

‘So? What do you want, money?’

‘Be realistic,’ Cliffie snapped, with enough sudden bitterness in his voice to make Harry glance up from the kettle and take notice. ‘Would I ask you for money? Am I stupid?’

‘Then it’s business.’

‘I am asking a favour of you.’

His nervousness was beginning to annoy Harry. When he saw that, Cliff ducked his head in acknowledgement. Licked his lips. ‘This, then. You put your motor through the Tunnel, buzz off to France, drive to a meet with some lads we have business with there, deliver a certain package, money changes hands. And that’s it.’

‘What’s in the package?’ Harry asked.

But his brother-in-law had exhausted his small stock of guile for the moment and took his tea out on to the lawn, the set of his back and shoulders indicating a sour response to sea-breezes and distant gulls.

Harry joined him. ‘So, what’s in the package?’ he repeated.

‘I told you, it’s a business thing,’ his brother-in-law said far, far too lightly.

They walked down to the sea together, hands plunged in pockets. It was one of those calm spring days when the grey of the water stretched all the way to the horizon and then seemed to curl upwards into sky. There was nothing to look at and no trick of the imagination could invent France, less than thirty miles away.

‘Come on, Harry, give me a break,’ Cliffie mumbled after another few minutes of uncomfortable silence. ‘I more or less told them you’re the man for the job. I mean you wasn’t named, I never named you, blah-blah-blah, but it’s all down to me to see it right, see it goes off.’

‘Is it drugs?’

Cliffie burst out laughing from pure nervous release. ‘Drugs?’ he cackled incredulously.

Harry threw his ice-cream cone into a wire bin and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. A total of eighteen years in prison, the last six in Parkhurst, had much altered his views on the life of crime. The sheer boredom of being banged up with other dreamers was worse than actual death: nowadays he lived on his pension and a little occasional delivery driving. In the old days he had a certain quiet class; as, for example, tooling Fat Tony up to Birmingham along the M1 in a stolen Aston Martin, establishing what turned out to be an unshakeable alibi and, as Tony said admiringly, a land speed record.

‘What do you drive now?’ Cliffie asked, punting him a double voddie in the Carpenter’s.

‘Nothing fancy.’

‘Good. That’s good. Look, I don’t want to put no pressure on you, Harry, but it’s my arse if I cock this up.’

‘How much is in it for me?’

‘A grand,’ Cliffie suggested, looking doubtful.

‘And what’s your end?’

‘Jesus, Harry, you don’t need to know all that. These guys I’m talking about — the geezers who want the job done — would have your balls off just for coughing in the wrong place. What I can tell you? Just that I’m bearing the heavy end of the load here, know what I’m saying?’

He glanced round the perfectly empty pub and then mouthed a single word: ‘Russians.’

If he had said his principals were the Band of the Irish Guards Harry could not have been more surprised. He stared at his brother-in-law, his thinning hair and faintly blue lips, the over-expensive suit hanging from sagging shoulders.

‘Who has the package now?’

‘Not relevant. I bring it to you. Then you drive it over. You know, just dead casual. It’ll be in the boot. A bit of cathedral bashing if you’re asked where you’re off to. Just a little spring break.’

‘How big is this thing?’

Cliffie hesitated. He brushed his lapel distractedly. ‘I need you to say yes before I go back to town. Then the final arrangements are made and then it goes down.’

‘When?’

‘When I tell you.’

Walking back up the road, Harry pointed out several plants he’d thought of growing in his own garden.

But Cliffie was jumpy. ‘Nice, I’m sure, but I’m seeing Bungalow City here, Harry. And that’s all I’m seeing.’

‘Where d’you drink these days?’ Harry asked him, far too casually.

‘Some things don’t change,’ his brother-in-law said.

But then again, some things change very nicely. Where before there had been a timber yard opposite the Bear and Staff in Stockwell, there was now a supermarket and its generous car-park. Harry sat munching a salt-beef, watching the pub door through binoculars. Cliffie was presently with a heavy-looking blonde in her forties. Two nights running they parked up round the corner and then walked in single file into the green painted pub Harry remembered very well from the days of his pomp.

On the third night they were inside, presumably boring the arse off their chosen cronies, when a black Lexus pulled up and a huge guy got out to fetch Cliffie. The poor chump actually came to the kerb to talk to the passenger in the Lexus with a v and t in his hand, a reckless piece of bravado. The conversation was short and Cliffie was still making his points when the car pulled away into traffic. He stood there looking lost. Harry felt sorry for him.

Cliffie followed the Lexus and Harry followed after, tooling along listening to the BBC World Service, a bit of a thing with him in recent years. The meet took place in a furniture repository, very Russian in its forlorn dilapidations. Harry watched through glasses from the perimeter fence of a skip hire company.

The Lexus people carried out a white parcel wrapped in gaffer tape and stood it on end. One of them lifted the hem and showed Cliffie the nature of the goods. A peachy white bum flared for the moment in the beams from passing cars. There was some jolly laughter.

‘Where was you last night?’ Cliffie shouted. ‘I told you to stay by the phone.’

‘Got the maps?’

‘I said to stay by the phone. You can’t mess with these Russian geezers. Now listen. The goods are in the back of my motor and I’m going to put them in yours. And then you’re going to drive to the spot marked X. Tomorrow. Have you got that? Not the day after, not some time over the weekend. Tomorrow.’

‘Are the goods perishable?’ Harry asked, just for the pleasure of seeing his brother-in-law sweat. Then he relented and put on his unlaced shoes. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

‘You stay right where you are. Here’s the map. Read the map.’

There really was a spot marked X. It lay less than a hundred kilometres from the coast, close to the Rouen-Paris motorway. Cliffie went over the plan, such as it was, again and again, passed across two hundred in notes and (a thoughtful touch) fifty in Euros for the petrol and a cup of tea and that.

‘You make the switch, right, and they’ll give you a grocery bag of dosh. Bank wrappers, all that.’

‘Do I count it?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Cliffie said bitterly. ‘It’ll all be kosher, believe me. They are messing with people who could start a third world war. They know that. You’re just the bloody messenger. They ain’t going to cross nobody.’

‘Well, give me a clue. How much dosh?’

‘One hundred thousand in US dollars,’ Cliffie said. ‘Which is like chump change to these geezers. Soon as you got it, you bell me, I’ll meet you back here at the ranch.’

After he’d left, Harry walked into his garage via the door in the kitchen, opened the boot to his car and studied the package. He tore off some yards of tape, rolled back the fabric and touched a bare foot. It was warm. Just behind the ankle was an artery and he held his thumb to it. Whoever was inside the wrapping was drugged to the eyeballs, doubtless, but comfortable. In the circumstances. He went back to the kitchen, lit a small cigar and sat listening to the fridge.

Along that part of the French coast are dunes and marshes. Next to a rainswept golf course there is a lopsided clapboard property painted black, the kind of place only an Englishman would consider taking on as a commercial proposition. It is labelled MOT L. Derek Jukes greeted Harry like an old mate, which after all he had once been.

‘How’s Ricky?’ Harry asked, out of courtesy.

‘That little fairy! It was too quiet for him here. What it is, Harry, I’ve put you round the back, there’s like a row of three but two is boarded up. It’s the salt. Do you need to put the car under cover?’

‘No, mate. I’ll be out of here by three. Four at the latest.’

He passed across Cliffie’s two hundred inside an Oxfam envelope.

‘Good boy,’ Derek said absently. ‘I’ve had the old paraffin heater on all night. You’ll find it warm enough.’

It was, in fact, stifling. Harry laid the package on the bed and cut it open with a Stanley knife. Inside was a girl in her early twenties. As he had imagined, she was naked and none too clean — the smell of her was overpowering enough to make him open the window. He checked her pulse. It was slow but regular.

Derek knocked at the door with a little tin box of works. He took in the situation at a glance, nodded, raised one of the girl’s eyelids. ‘She’s only a kid,’ he murmured.

‘Safe to risk it?’ Harry asked.

‘Run the shower. She’s going to be spewing her ring for an hour or so. Don’t worry, mate. I am a former medical orderly of Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force. You can’t get better, this time of the morning. I take it what we have here is battlefield conditions.’

‘You’re a straight-up bloke, Derek,’ Harry said.

‘Not exactly, not as such.’

He took out the syringe and shooed Harry into the bathroom.

She was called Marika. Passing through international frontiers as a comatose parcel was a bit of a thing with her — she had been abducted by Cliffie’s set of geezers three months earlier as part payment of a gambling debt incurred in Düsseldorf, where she had been unhappy, but not desperate, so to speak. This bold stroke had got up the nose of the Dusseldorf Russian, whose girl she had been, and so far three people had been killed in the ensuing business negotiations.

‘Well, now it’s all back to square one,’ Harry suggested.

‘You are crazy,’ Marika observed with Slavic despair.

‘You get to go home — Düsseldorf anyway — and the London geezers get their debt paid in cash. Where’s the prob?’

‘For something so simple they have to do me up like a turkey? Why not I fly to Düsseldorf? Why they need you?’

Harry considered. ‘Because when they get you back, they’re going to kill you.’

‘For sure.’

All this while she sat on the bed naked, accepting little spoonfuls of a lightly boiled egg. She seemed to sense that Harry and naked women had not been strangers in the past: her movements and gestures were entirely unselfconscious.

‘You don’t want to know why they kill me?’

‘I probably wouldn’t be able to follow it in detail. A hundred thousand dollars has been mentioned, though.’

‘Ha! And pigs might fly,’ Marika said with a rare stab at idiom.

‘Yes,’ Harry said.

Derek poured them both a Stella. ‘Look at it this way,’ he said. ‘Say the dosh exists. For a hundred grand I could lose you both in this country, no probs.’

‘For a few months, maybe.’

‘All right then, say it doesn’t exist. You still get their car, whatever gear they have on them, their watches, wallets and all that — you’re still coming out ahead on the day. And, put it this way, the more mess you make, the more it turns into a war-type situation where you and the kid become idle bystanders, mere nothings.’

‘Making good sense now, Derek.’

‘Or,’ the former medical orderly and Brighton drag queen concluded, ‘you could just knock her out again, deliver the goods and sod the lot of them.’

‘What have you got in the way of weaponry?’

‘Me?’ Derek protested.

‘Bloody hell,’ Harry said.

They were going to have to do this work with a pistol that hadn’t been fired since 1987 and five rounds of ammunition, arms that until last night had been under a floorboard in Harry’s bungalow. He sighed.

‘You know what this is all about? Honour. These geezers have seen too many films. The girl goes home in the most insulting way possible, done up like a turkey. It’s a power thing, like I spit on your shoe, Düsseldorf. Yeah, Düsseldorf says, and I spit in your eye because there is no hundred thousand dollars. That is the bones of the plot, Derek.’

‘You got five shots. You miss with two, that’s three shots to off the boys who turn up. Which requires a cool head.’

In that instant they heard a distant and unmistakable report out in the marshes. M. Dieumegard, a retired lawyer from Soissons, was playing at duck-hunting with his Japanese pump-action. It was all very illegal, what he was doing, and he turned to greet the car with French plates with the faintly queasy feeling that he had been rumbled. Which he had. He surrendered the gun and nineteen cartridges, accepted a receipt for them scribbled on a pink slip, gave a false address and counted himself lucky. As the jovial plain-clothes policeman pointed out, the gun was in any case pretty useless. A duck would have to be sitting at the next barstool to be sure of being slaughtered.

‘It was an impulse buy from a catalogue,’ M. Dieumegard admitted gloomily.

Back to Marika, wearing some jeans and a white T-shirt Harry had purchased at a supermarket the moment they got off the ferry. No bra or knickers but a pair of what looked like red bowling shoes, two sizes too big.

‘Now listen,’ Harry said. ‘I’m going to have a go at these people we’ve been talking about.’

‘Impossible,’ Marika cried.

‘No, it’s just ordinary common sense. But none of it need involve you. If you stay here, you should be safe for a week or so. So long as you don’t go outside. And if there are any dollars, then I’ll see you right.’

‘They will kill you,’ the girl said.

‘Maybe.’

‘I know. Because, if they were going to do business, then they wouldn’t send old man like you. You and me both pffft. That is the plan.’ She put her forefinger to her head and pulled the trigger.

Harry glanced at his watch. ‘I’m taking Derek with me for company,’ he said.

The meet had been arranged an hour after sunset, a time when the last tractor had grumbled away into the gloom. The spot was well chosen, for it lay upon a crossroads at least two kilometres from the nearest farmhouse. Harry’s car was parked up on a little rectangle of ground where the local council kept their pile of gravel. There was also a very handy bottle bank on short stilts.

The Audi with German plates drove up at normal speed, turned left and disappeared into the night. Harry stared at the pistol in his lap, opened the car door and then drew it gently to without engaging the latch. The seat was pushed back as far as it would go, leaving his arms free of the steering wheel: other than these precautions he did not have the faintest idea what to do. Except smoke. He lit a rollie he’d made earlier.

When the boys came back it was from the direction they’d taken earlier. The lights were on main beam and raked the interior of Harry’s car. The Audi slewed to a halt a hundred metres away.

‘Yes. Get out of the car please,’ a guy yelled from the driver’s side.

‘Let’s get out together,’ Harry yelled back.

The Mexican stand-off. A long-eared owl, a European rarity, flew through the Audi’s beam and then veered indignantly away. After an uncomfortable pause three doors of the German car opened and the same number of men got out, each carrying an Uzi. Harry opened his own door and stood behind it, the pistol dangling in his right hand. The only good thing so far was that these guys were young.

‘Where is your passenger?’ one of them cried.

‘I have a parcel in the boot,’ Harry countered.

Every second that passed, he felt heartened. They were cocky wee sods, toting their own shooters at arm’s length, chewing gum, acting up. Tarantino. They sauntered towards the car.

‘Stay very still, old man,’ one advised.

‘No probs,’ he said, trying to match the international tone.

‘Stand away from the car.’

‘I’m scared, boys.’

It got a laugh. They ambled a little closer.

‘You are a dead man,’ the smallest of the three suddenly decided.

Harry missed with the first shot, hit with the second as Derek let loose with the shotgun from underneath the commune’s bottle bank. All three Russians fell, cursing. Harry fired twice more and jumped back into his car, reversing away in a shower of gravel and the smaller roadside weeds. Four more agonising minutes passed, punctuated by a final blast from the shotgun and then he saw the Audi speed away, Derek driving. The headlights blipped in a victory signal.

Bloody hell, he thought. This is too easy. It was only then that he realised that all along the Russians had been firing at him. He was sitting in a pool of blood. The old motor was handling a bit funny but he drove the back roads to the coast with what he liked to think of as professional calm, passing through village after village of shuttered houses and empty streets.

‘They were after your tackle,’ Derek murmured in the scorching heat of Cabin 7. The wound that had caused all the mess was inside his right thigh, high up. It had passed through the car door before hitting him, which accounted for what the ex-medical orderly called a rare bit of good luck but a nasty jag all the same.

‘There was no money, of course.’

‘Nah. We got the Audi, one of the guns, a laptop and a few hundred euros.’

‘You are brave men,’ Marika said, holding Harry’s leg down while the wound was sutured.

‘Was anyone killed?’ he asked.

Derek tutted. ‘And you a hardened criminal! These were kids sent on a man’s errand, Harry. It’s terrible, the things that happen nowadays. And d’you want to know what I think?’

They did.

It happened that the European Cup Final was held that year in Dortmund. The two Russian rivals who had started all these shenanigans met in an hospitality suite high up in the stands where they were photographed sharing a joke. One was toting a recent Miss Austria and the other one had girl-band superstar and Essex bimbo Robyn Nevill on his arm. The mood was cordial, fuelled by cocaine.

‘So, how’s your big boat?’ one of them said in rapid Russian, referring to a monstrous white mini-liner presently moored in Monaco.

‘It’s good. How is your island?’

‘Yeh, yeh, the island. It’s good. But I tell you frankly, the Sicilians can be a pain in the arse about such matters. With them everything’s a history thing.’

‘History!’ his rival repeated jovially, and they both laughed long and loud at the absurdity of the concept.

‘These pumped-up clowns had very little sense of yesterday. They are villains with no need of the healing balm that memory provides the rest of us.’

So Derek, trying to teach Harry how to play golf. ‘That, and the simple fact that they’d rather be pop stars or footballers than decent honest criminals. They are shoppers, is what they are. It’s a bloody disgrace, Harry boy.’

‘Grateful to you as ever, Derek.’

At that moment, Derek was fiddling about, moving Harry’s fingers this way and that on the golf club. It was, apparently, all in the grip. ‘Heard from the girl?’ he asked.

‘What a romantic old queen you are, Dekker.’

Even Cliffie survived the adventure, though minus the toes on both feet, which he explained was just a bit of fun, just their way of marking his card. He walked a bit strange and his shoes cost a bloody fortune these days but all in all he counted himself a lucky man. He looked around the Carpenter’s, where the whole scheme was first hatched.

‘Don’t you ever get tired of living down here?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘It suits me. Jean liked it.’

‘What a stroke you pulled, son,’ Cliffie muttered. ‘That kid owes you her life.’

Harry threw him a very sharp glance. ‘Nice of you to say so,’ he said with elaborate irony.

It passed clean over Cliffie’s head. As Jean always said about her brother, he wasn’t thick exactly but he never really got out of the playground. Mind, Harry thought, if he asks one more question about Operation Crossroads, I’m going to tear his lungs out. He watched indulgently as Cliffie reviewed all the possible things he might say next.

‘I always loved her, you know. Jean, I mean.’

Harry touched him on the sleeve of his jacket and called for two more doubles. As happened once every three days or so, the fruit machine down at the far end of the bar paid a jackpot. Neither man looked up. Now there really was an activity designed for losers.