The Last Card Read Free Page A

of Colin ‘Sweetwater’ Joseph. Joseph may have been sweet before this meeting, but he wasn’t sweet tonight. In the seven years since H had fought Mancini, the Bugle Boy from the bad side of Manchester had gone from strength to strength. His upper body had bulked, he’d learnt one or two classy combinations and someone, somewhere, had taught him how to bob and move. Mancini could now box. The Trinidadian was finding it out the tough way.
    H looked away. He could no longer stand watching boxing on television.
    Various unsavoury characters milled about the room, drinking and chatting. Some H recognised, some he didn’t. In the middle of one group sat Ghadaffi, the smartly-suited, Oxbridge-educated, Libyan nightclub owner; beside him was Boo, Nigerian hard man and petty thief. Sharon, a thin, pale junkie from East London, was helping himself to a sandwich and ignoring Stammer, a big but dumb-looking Jamaican in an white shell-suit and large gold chains, who played alone, as usual, on a one-armed bandit. There was Sammy, South London’s hardest-working mini-cab driver; and finally Dipak, a Ugandan Asian, who had seen good days, bad days, and was old enough to know that gambling was an addiction. Dipak owned the all-night grocer’s on Shepherd’s Bush Green and was one of Blackie’s best punters.
    Sitting at the large table stacking chips sat a soberly dressed, dark-skinned Jamaican, Blackie. Blackie’s skin was so black it almost looked blue. He was the Houseman; this was his shebeen, newly moved from a spot in Ladbroke Grove.
    Blackie wasn’t big but nobody ever crossed him. Not twice anyway. The last person to do that, as far as H could remember, was Cookie, a young, smooth-talking Tunisian. Cookie loved the sound of his own voice and could talk his way out of any kind of problem. Cookie especially loved to talk on mobiles, loudly and without inhibition . Women loved to hear him because he could string together wonderfully fragrant phrases; sentences that could charm a nun. H winced as he remembered the story. Blackie had been playing a big game in a shebeen in North London; five-card poker, or stud poker as some people call it. It was a big hand, there was a lot of money on the table, and the man playing opposite Blackie was a fish. He had his own carpentry business and was loaded. Blackie had, apparently, been stringing him along all evening, allowing the fish to win just enough of the small hands to sucker him into a big hand where Blackie would move in for the kill. As the hand approached its climax, a hush had descended over the game. Blackie was slowly reeling the fish in when Cookie entered the room, talking on his mobile. Checking out the clientele Cookie had doubtless seen a number of attractive women in the house. And so, instead of lowering his voice as protocol dictated – given the stage of the hand Blackie was playing – Cookie raised it. Braying loudly into his phone, he looked around to see who was listening in to his conversation.
    Blackie, apparently, didn’t react immediately. According to the story he kept his focus, his eyes trained on the businessman. The man’s forehead glowed as he chomped with apparent nonchalance on a fat cigar. It was his move. For Blackie this moment was the difference between collecting the pot as it stood, or at least doubling it. The moment was tense. But for Cookie’s braying. Anyone who looked closely would have seen the vein in Blackie’s left temple begin to throb: the first indication that all was not well. When his right hand began to paw distractedly at the baize of the table, it should have been a clear warning for anyone who knew Blackie. But Cookie wasn’t looking at Blackie. He was looking at the full, frank bosom of an attractive Ghanan woman..
    Finally, Blackie turned to Cookie. ‘Stop oonu blood clat chat, no man! You cian’ see we playin?!’
    Cookie looked round, startled. But at that moment Blackie was undone. Once he had taken his eyes away