The Thing Itself

THIRTY-SIX

Victor Tempest exercise book four

The club was as rough as they come. The floor was sticky from years of spilled beer and worse. The room smelled of stale booze, disinfectant, tobacco and sweat.

The pugnacious-looking men playing billiards at the two beaten-up tables paused to watch our progress to the bar. Other men sat around bar tables littered with cards and dominoes, their heads haloed with smoke from the cigarettes clamped between their teeth.

A tough customer at the bar turned at our approach. About five feet ten, broad-shouldered, hard eyes.

‘Martin — always a pleasure.’ He glanced at me. ‘You’re bringing the law here?’

‘Ex-law,’ I said.

‘He’s one of us, Baby, one of us,’ Charteris said, his smile nervous. He turned to me. ‘Don, I’d like you to meet Tony Mancini.’

The man nodded. I looked at Charteris.

‘What are you playing at? I’ve met Tony Mancini and this isn’t him.’

The man at the bar grimaced.

‘You met Cecil England. Also known as Jack Notyre. He nicked my fucking name and my reputation.’ He stuck his chest out. ‘Trust me — I am the one and the only Tony Mancini. “Baby” to my friends.’ He put a grotesque expression on his face. ‘On account of I look so angelic.’

He stuck out his hand. I took it and he tried to crush mine. Then he looked over my shoulder. I glanced back to the door. Eric Knowles was loitering there. He nodded and disappeared up the stairs.

Mancini let go of my hand.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Duty calls.’ He looked over at the barman. ‘Get these gents whatever they want.’

He followed Knowles up the stairs and I looked at Charteris.

‘What’s going on? Did you see who just turned up?’

‘Business in common. The Big Jew and the Little Jew. Baby is having trouble with the Little Jew — kike gangsters who run half of Soho. Except the BUF is going to come to some arrangement.’

I looked around.

‘With Italian hoodlums.’

‘Don’t be such a snob, Don. We all want the same thing in the end. Self-betterment.’

I took a sip of my drink.

‘What’s the story on Baby?’

‘Ha — well, there’s a weird thing about him and the Trunk Murder-’

But I didn’t hear what it was. What I heard instead was the hurried, heavy tread of half a dozen policemen who burst into the room a moment later.

‘Police raid!’

The barman was already out of a door behind the bar and Charteris and I were right behind him. Charteris went left, I went right and that’s the last I ever saw of him.

I went back to Wardour Street in 1942 with some mates on leave. The bar was still there but Baby Mancini wasn’t. In October 1941 he’d gone to the gallows for the murder of a Jewish gangster in a brawl in the club upstairs.