Angelmaker (72 page)

“Where’s the key?” Polly Cradle asks.

Tam grins. “Oh, well …”

Joe Spork grins back, a wolf’s lolling tongue peeping out from under a sheep costume. “If you need a key, you’ve got no use for what’s in the box.”

Polly persuades Joe not to crash the car through the fence, which is his first, heady option, so he cuts the wire instead, right under a security camera. She waits for the alarm to go off, and nothing happens.

“Most of them don’t have one,” Joe murmurs, “and the ones which do, well, it’s property crime, isn’t it, not residential. Police’ll show up in the morning. Guard’s not about to come and see what’s happening if he can help it, is he? Even if the cameras work, which that one likely doesn’t because it’s not plugged into anything. Most of the world works that way. It just assumes you’re too chicken to find out.”

“I think it’s wireless,” Polly Cradle says carefully. “I remember the catalogue.”

“Oh.” He looks at the little lens. It abruptly seems very alert. “Well, best we hurry, then.” He grins, unrepentant, and she laughs.

A few moments later, in the shadow of the corrugated iron wall, he uses the same bolt-cutters on the padlock of door 334. He shoulders through, then shuts the door and turns on the lights.

“Wow,” Joe Spork says after a moment.

This is almost certainly the most orange place in England. It may be the most orange place in the world. Row upon row of numbered orange boxes, and beyond them, orange doors set into orange walls. It is not a soft, sunset orange or a painter’s orange, but a bright, plastic, waxed-fruit orange which knows no compromise. It’s the kind of orange which would allow you to find your container in a blizzard or after an avalanche.

Polly Cradle assumes he will also cut the lock on container C193, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just lifts the door up and out, and it comes off quite smoothly. He uses the padlock as a hinge.

Inside, there’s a man.

He’s sitting with his back to them in a big leather armchair. He wears a hat and a pair of gloves. By his left hand is a carpet bag, and by his right, a trombone case. He doesn’t move.

Joe Spork edges forward, and breathes out. It’s just a dressmaker’s dummy. Very ha ha, he thinks. Very Mathew. A small shock, just to keep you on your toes, test your mettle. Or maybe just for fun. Mind you, Mathew himself might have shot it, and that would have ruined a perfectly decent hat. Exactly the kind of hat Joe was thinking of a
few hours ago. A hat to ravish dancehall girls in, to shade a fellow’s face while he runs moonshine. He moves closer.

The zip on the carpet bag is thick and dry. It sticks. He tugs at it, back, then forward, then back. Yes. The bag opens.

Shirts. A wad of money, perhaps a thousand pounds, in useless old-style ten-pound notes. A small pouch containing what can only be diamonds. Today’s value in the straight world: a couple of hundred thousand. Walking-around money. A toothbrush, because Mathew hated to be without, and a couple of tins of preserved fruit. A bottle of Scotch, a packet of tobacco. And … oh. Another set of Polaroids, rather ribald: a rubicund fellow in a wealth of female company on the sofa at one of Mathew’s parties. Not a lot of clothing to speak of, and a number of things going on which one newspaper or another might consider a bit naughty.
The Hon Don takes his pleasure, 1 of 6
in Mathew’s hand on the back. A very solid bit of blackmail, ho ho, and surely this is what the somewhat dishonourable Donald was expecting when Joe bearded him the other day.

He looks around and sees what he’s looking for, taped loosely to the trombone case: a dirty postcard from Brighton circa 1975 showing a cheeky disco girl with her dress falling down.

Joe glances at the card, praying to God the text on the back is not long, not tortured, most of all that it will not apologise or accuse, or tell him he has sisters in five counties and a brother in Scotland. Or that there’s a corpse field under the warehouse.

Joe
, it says, in large, friendly letters.
Oil the slide and watch the safety, it’s loose. Love, Dad
.

Here, in this room, is evidence of care from Mathew Spork for his one begotten son, a gesture of love and an appeal for absolution. Not just a memento or an escape kit. A Gangster’s Parachute. Just in case the straight life doesn’t work out.

Without hesitation, Joe strips the dummy and changes his clothes. The suit is a little loose around the shoulders, but other than that, it’s a good fit. His father’s guess at his full growth, and the tailor’s. Polly Cradle watches in silence as he puts on the hat.

He turns to the trombone case.

It isn’t a trombone case, of course. It looks a bit like one, but—Arthur Sullivan notwithstanding—no one in Joe’s situation actually believes their problems can be solved with a trombone. Unless he is greatly mistaken, the case contains something louder and less musical.
It is also extremely illegal, but Joe is rather a long way past the point where he cares about that. He opens the case. The not-trombone is resting in pieces in black velvet compartments. Various tools and expendables are included in the kit, so that he can maintain and furnish his not-trombone at home. There’s even a score, telling you how to play music on it, and what ingredients are necessary for the creation of further vital supplies. And on the inside of the lid is the maker’s mark: the Auto-Ordnance Corporation of New York.

Papa Spork’s beloved Thompson sub-machine gun.

He realises, suddenly, how very long he has been waiting for this moment.

He grins, and carefully slots the pieces into place, then stands in the semi-dark. He lifts the tommy gun in across his chest, and smiles a smile of wide, boyish joy.

“ ‘At last, my hand is whole again,’ ” says Crazy Joe Spork.

T
he Pablum Club is not actually in St. James’s. It’s off to one side, and it isn’t nearly as ancient as the doorman’s spectacles would suggest. Founded as a place where gentlemen who retained fire in the gut could escape from the fossilised remnants at the Athenaeum and the O&C, it has all the external trappings, all the leather chairs and expensive brandies, but the patrons generally discuss their mistresses rather than their handicaps, and an iron rule of secrecy applies to all conversations great or small, on pain of disenfranchisement. If the modern establishment has a special fortress, a medal for long service at the old boys’ wheel, it is the Pablum.

The Hon Don is a major stakeholder, so Joe orders himself an obscenely ancient and expensive malt whisky and a Patrón Gold tequila (with actual gold in it) for Polly Cradle. Then he puts his two-tone brogues up on the mahogany coffee table and lets his head fall onto the backrest of his thronelike chair. After a moment, the fellows’ butler arrives to ask him not to and to inquire as to whether the lady would not prefer the Ladies’ Bar. Polly Cradle smiles and says she wouldn’t, and the fellows’ butler replies that he is almost sure she would, and Polly Cradle very gently tells him that really, she wouldn’t, whereupon the fellows’ butler appeals to Joe and Joe tells him to get the Hon Don
toot suite
, and shows him his gun.

The fellows’ butler runs like hell, but does not—because gentlemen
with fire in the gut are prone to this sort of outburst—call the police. Polly Cradle lets Bastion out of his bag, and he selects a damasked sofa and, despite being small, occupies it entirely. Joe smiles a smile of malign anticipation, and waits.

Part of him—he’s coming to think of his hesitations as Old Joe—feels strongly that his presence here is premature. He should plan, he should husband his resources. He should, in fact, be sensible. To this injunction the inner gangster responds with a deep and flatulent raspberry. If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If it gives you compromising pictures of venal bankers with a wide and varied social acquaintance in the halls of power, then you blackmail while the sun shines.

“I need the Hon Don,” he’d told Polly Cradle on the way back to London, “and I need the Night Market. Whatever I’m doing, I’m going to need them. I can feel it.” She made love to him, as promised, between junctions fifteen and seven. He closes his eyes for a moment in heady recollection.

A notedly traditionalist bishop goes to sit on the damasked sofa, leaps up as the episcopal fundament is assailed by Bastion’s one remaining tooth, and then nearly expires of sheer horror at the pink marble eyes and the halitotic sneer.

The Hon Don arrives a moment later with their drinks.

“Hello, Hon Don!” Joe carols.

“Hello, Hésus, my old friend,” the Hon Don says loudly, and nods to the shaking bishop. “ ’Lo, Your Eminence, have you met Hésus, sounds like your sort of fellow, doesn’t he, with a name like that, but of course it’s very common
in Spain
, where he’s from.” This with a warning glance at Joe and Polly. “Yes, indeed, Count Hésus of Santa Mirabella—and I do believe I’ve not met the countess, you must be she, how charming, utterly,” and at this point he’s put down the drinks and is close enough to snarl “What the
fuck
are you doing here, you little shithead?” as he goes to embrace his guest.

Joe Spork smiles a beatific smile, and produces a colour photocopy of the incriminating Polaroid snaps. “I bring closure, Don. I bring joy to all mankind. My family’s estates may lie in ruins, but I have my father’s heritance. I know you’ll be relieved to hear it’s all intact and in a safe place. There was something he always wanted you to have, but death took him”—he smiles at the bishop, who has found a dog-less and uncomfortable-looking lounger in the corner, and waves—“I
should say ‘the Lord God, merciful and mighty, took him off to his just reward,’ hello, Your Eminence, most pleased to make your acquaintance, I am Hésus de la Castillia di Manchego di Rioja di Santa Mirabella, and this is my lady wife, Poli-Amora, greetings from the Most August Court of Spain! Yes, greetings, to you and your family, may they have many children within wedlock and rock the vault of Heaven with their procreations!” But when he turns back to the Hon Don
sotto voce
there is suddenly an absolute cold in his face, a shadow of days and nights in the tiny room at Happy Acres, “So you’re all mine, you old goat, or your life will be miserable unto the last hour, you hear me? Because your first problem will be explaining what you were doing with two girls from the chorus at The Pink Parrot and that will be as nothing—
as nothing
—to the fuss which will kick off when they learn whose living room you were in and who dobbed you in, namely me, namely Britain’s most wanted, and they will dig through every aspect of your life and fuck it up as they have done mine, and they will find nothing about me (which will only make them more suspicious) and doubtless a few dozen things which you would prefer were not revealed, and after that, if I am not dead, I will come into your house like a cleansing flame and I will smite you as you have never been smote before,
sing hallelujah!
”

He flings his hands high into the air and smiles at the bishop, who nods genially back and hides behind the
Financial Times
. The Hon Don glowers.

“What do you want?”

“Addresses, Donald. Names and places. I wish to know of the lives and loves of a fat man and a thin one, mandarins from the shady bit of our glorious civil service. I shall also require the use of one of your more secluded—no, let’s stretch a point and say soundproofed—properties. I believe you have a couple on the edge of Hampstead Heath which would be ideal. We shall speak of it
in camera
. But have we established the principle?”

“Yes,” the Hon Don mutters through gritted teeth, “we have.”

Fifteen minutes later, Joshua Joseph Spork is on his hands and knees in a tide of local papers, cutting out the small ads for a hidden message: the perfect image of paranoid schizophrenia. The scissors are a
nice touch, culled from an embroidery set and blunted at the ends. A selection of pencils of various colours is scattered across the floor of the Hon Don’s office at the Pablum Club. The Hon Don is elsewhere, no doubt soothing his fevered brow with a brace of exotic dancers. Polly Cradle leans, Bacall-style, on the bar, and listens to her lover mutter.