Jack Carter's Law Read Free Page B

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she says, “How about a kiss, then?” “For Christ’s sake,” Gerald says, “you know who I’ve got here?” “I’m not going to let you go without a kiss,” she says. “Oh, all right,”
Gerald says and makes a kissing noise down the phone, and she fakes one back, only her lips, when she purses them, are kissing me, and like I say, not on my mouth. The line goes dead and she carries on with the kissing.
    After Audrey’s gone I have a shower and do myself a steak and salad. Gerald and Les can wait a bit longer. They’re not to know what time I met Cross. While I’m eating my steak and having an extra couple of drinks I watch television but I really don’t take anything in because I’m thinking of what Audrey said about being barmy carrying on together. I’d had that thought ever since we’d first tumbled. But the alternative, rowing out, just wasn’t on as far as I was concerned. Not since that very first time. Every bird I’ve ever had was just so much cold meat compared to Audrey. And in any case, trying to row out from a bird like Audrey would be just as dangerous as the present situation. The shit would fly whatever I did. So as usual I give up thinking about it and put on my gear and start out for the club.

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    Gerald and Les
    T HE RAIN HAS STOPPED and the greasy streets are full of tourists trying to turn up the naughty bits of London. I get out of the cab and unlock the sober sage-green painted doors and Alex is standing there behind the lobby’s glass doors, his teeth highlighted whiter than ever beyond the glass’s bright reflection. I push open the glass doors and Alex helps me off with my coat.
    “Anything?” I ask him.
    “Nothing yet, Mr. Carter. A small game in the Green Room but it won’t get any bigger. The rest are just drinking.” Up above me there is the faint sound of Motown-style music.
    “All the girls reported?”
    “All of them,” Alex says.
    I walk over to the plain door next to the cloakroom and unlock the door and open it and slide back the cage doors of the private lift and press the button. The lift only has one stop and that’s Gerald and Les’s penthouse office on the top of the club. The lift smells like the inside of a stripper’s G-string which isn’t surprising considering the amount of slag traffic it’s carried since my bosses, the Fletcher brothers, had it installed eighteen months ago. You’d have thought Gerald would have had enough of slags considering the route by which the two of them arrived at the top of the building that was now the centre of their operation. But not Gerald. Slags to him are like scotch to an alcoholic. Not that Les is a total abstainer but more often than not he’ll pour himself a drink and watch Gerald get on with it, with the kind of mild interest someone else would watch a couple of kittens at play. Les lives his life more in his head than Gerald does.
    The lift stops and I get out. I’m in a small windowless hall. There is only one piece of furniture, a leatherette swivel armchair, and sitting in the armchair is Duggie Burnett. He’s wearing a hound’s-tooth suit—two buttons with side vents, narrow trousers with deep turn-ups—a yellow waistcoat, a Viyella check shirt and a plain woolen tie. He’d look like something straight off the early-morning downs at Newmarket if it wasn’t for the fact that his nose is on sideways and the rings he wears on each of his fingers aren’t there just for show. At the present moment he has a serviette tucked in his waistcoat and he is genteelly balancing a plate of sandwiches on his knees. The sandwiches have been daintily cut and served up with slices of tomato on top and a patterned doily underneath but Duggie is absorbed in gently taking the sandwiches apart and placing the salad stuff to one side and picking up the slices of ham with his fingers and eating them that way. Each time he places a slice in his mouth he thoroughly cleans the grease off his fingers with his