Duffy (16 page)

‘Well, I’ll give you just a tiny idea, just a glimmer. Why did McKechnie hire you?’

‘’Cos he thought I was good, I suppose.’

‘But how did he find you?’

‘Oh, he said he asked about.’

‘And what did you make of that?’

‘That my reputation is spreading faster than you think.’ It was true, though, Duffy had wondered how McKechnie had got hold of him.

‘
I
told him about you, Duffy,
I
recommended you. He came to see me and
I
said
you
. You ask him.’

‘I will. Why?’

‘It seemed like a good idea then. From what I knew. But I didn’t know then what I know now.’

‘Well, that’s very clearly put. Care to explain?’

‘No.’

‘What’s going on, Shaw?’ Shaw didn’t reply. ‘Is Martoff making a move?’

‘I can’t tell you, Duffy. I don’t know everything, and what I do know keeps changing. What I will say is this. You know as well as I do that in a place like our patch there’s always a delicate balance between us and the villains. It’s not a great war like the public seems to imagine and it’s not a lazy heap of coppers on the take like you seem to imagine. The villains and us carry on side by side and there’s a sort of what you call osmosis between us. You understand what I mean by osmosis, Duffy?’

‘I understand what other people mean by it as well.’

‘Well, you’re upsetting this delicate balance, you see, Duffy. That’s about as clearly as I can put it to you.’

‘You can’t put it any more clearly?’

‘No I can’t. So lay off.’

‘What about a deal, Shaw? Everyone’s quite keen on deals around the patch, it seems to me.’

‘What sort of deal, Duffy?’

‘Well, what about this? I’ll lay off, as you put it, if you tell me who it was at West Central who fitted me up.’

‘Not still worrying about that, are you? It’s all dead and past, Duffy.’

‘Well, if it’s dead and past, it won’t matter you telling me, will it? Who helped Martoff set me up?’

‘I never really knew, Duffy. I had my sus, same as anyone else, but you can’t just operate on sus, as you know. Though I can’t think who else it could have been.’

‘Is it a deal? I’ll lay off if you tell me who helped fit me up?’

Shaw paused for a bit.

‘O.K., Duffy, it’s a deal. But I’d rather you guessed and I nodded my head.’

What difference did that make? So that Shaw could deny having told Duffy? So that he could say Duffy must just have guessed? Still, if it made it easier for his sodding conscience.

‘Sullivan.’

Shaw nodded immediately. Duffy picked up their cups and took them to the sink. Then he walked wordlessly to the door and held it open for Shaw to leave.

It was funny. He hadn’t minded in the very least lying to Shaw.

He sat and reflected on the odd coincidence of being warned off twice within hours, once by Martoff and once by Shaw. Was there some connection? Had Martoff told Sullivan to send a messenger boy round? What were they afraid he might find out? What was all that stuff about ‘delicate balance’? Usually, all it meant was ‘Stop interfering with my slice of the take.’

At nine o’clock the telephone went. When the pips finished he recognised Carol’s voice, but she didn’t say hello.

‘I’m not ringing you, you haven’t heard from me, you haven’t seen me for a week.’ She sounded quite calm, as if setting out her terms.

‘All right.’

‘Your client’s warehouse in Lexington Street is burning.’

The telephone went dead. No goodbye, nothing.

Duffy took a taxi, left it in Shaftesbury Avenue, and dodged up Windmill Street through the crowds of punters gawping at the cinema stills. The south end of Lexington Street was cordoned off by police. Halfway up he saw a couple of fire engines parked. One had run up a ladder and a fireman at the top was playing a hose on the small one-and-a-half storey warehouse from above. Two more hoses were being aimed on the building from ground level. Duffy wondered if the firemen knew what was inside. There must be quite a danger of an explosion if you had a hangar full of the sort of things kids liked for Christmas: cheap masks painted with cheap, flammable paint; indoor fireworks; paper hats.

Duffy wondered if the coppers had bothered to inform McKechnie. Then he had a thought. He walked along Brewer Street for a few yards and turned up Great Pulteney Street, which ran parallel to Lexington. Halfway down it he came to a short alley which went along the side of a pub and was only used by draymen delivering their loads. At the end of the alley there was a fence. Duffy shinned up it and took a look round. He found himself about three houses up from McKechnie’s warehouse. The two streets were close together, with only tiny back courtyards between them. Almost all the houses had long since been turned into shops and offices. There were no lights in the windows; everyone had gone home.

The warehouse was still burning brightly as Duffy worked his way gradually across the courtyards. When he got almost opposite he stopped and looked. The flames were stabbing through the roof, despite all the water being poured in by the fire brigade. It was clear that McKechnie’s stock would be entirely destroyed. Duffy wondered why Martoff had ordered it: the stock wouldn’t be any use to him now; neither would the building. At best, he’d be able to buy up the site cheaply. Maybe that was all he wanted. Or maybe it was simply a move which, like the cutting of Rosie McKechnie, had no obvious motive at the time. Maybe there were payoffs in several directions; maybe people in similar positions to McKechnie were being shown what could easily happen to them.

Suddenly the warehouse caved in. With a long, rumbling roar, the roof gave way. Everything seemed to move in opposite directions at the same time. The roof fell in, the flames shot up, sparks flew in every direction, the rear wall half collapsed backwards and out, and burning bales of McKechnie’s goods came hurtling out of the warehouse into the courtyard.

Duffy ran back as the collapse occurred, and waited while the fire took new life with the influx of air. Then, gradually, the hoses began to get it under control again. Duffy walked across to the fence belonging to the office which backed immediately on to the warehouse, and, out of curiosity as much as anything, hauled himself up it. He peered over the top at the burning bundles of McKechnie’s goods which had been hurled out by the explosion of heat; the flames were beginning to die down. He looked again. Then he quickly threw a leg over the fence and dropped quietly down into the yard. The only person who might spot him was the fireman on the ladder high above the wrecked warehouse; but even so, Duffy kept in the shadows. A roped cube of McKechnie’s goods lay in front of him, about three feet away: it was a charred bundle of magazines. They were not the sort of magazines you gave to a kid in a King Kong mask and a clown’s hat.

Duffy reached out a foot and kicked the bundle apart. A few of the blackened magazines on the outside burst briefly into flame again; the rest sprayed out. He read the familiar titles:
Private, Colour Climax, Selecta, Animal No 9
,
Sex Bizarre, Ero.
Standard imported hardcore, the secret currency of dirty bookshops. In Duffy’s time on the patch, they went for five or six quid a time. He didn’t know what to allow for inflation, but he reckoned that he’d just kicked a bundle of five hundred quid or so, in street terms. Big Eddy was right: there was a bit more blood in McKechnie’s stone than Duffy had thought.

He climbed back out into Great Pulteney Street and walked down to Brewer. He strolled along to the end of Lexington Street and took another look up it. There were only two hoses on the fire now; it seemed to be coming under control. He wandered on along Brewer Street, fairly certain that neither Martoff’s nor Sullivan’s men would be giving him a thought. When he reached the end of Brewer he spotted a little knot of gawpers gathered on a corner staring into a dirty bookshop. Not the usual sort of behaviour for punters, he thought. Then he noticed that the shop window had a hole in it and the interior had been damaged by fire. Not gutted – just blackened a bit here and there. Through the window a man in a brown coat could be seen sweeping up.

Duffy chased a memory of five years ago. Hadn’t this been one of Ronnie’s bookshops? Ronnie, who was Renée’s pimp? He checked again in his mind, and was pretty sure it had been. Ronnie in those days had had four shops. This one, one nearby in Old Compton Street, one in Frith and one in Greek. Sticking to his punter’s gait, Duffy ambled his way along Old Compton Street. Outside the bookshop there he found a shabby fat man taping a newspaper over a hole in the window.

‘Get a brick, mate?’ he enquired chummily of the man.

‘Brick? Fucking paraffin ’eater.’

‘Why’d anyone want to do a thing like that?’ asked Duffy in a naïve voice.

‘Well, it wasn’t that Mrs Whitehouse, I can bleeding tell you,’ came the indirect reply.

Duffy walked round to Greek Street; as he approached the third of Ronnie’s shops the cluster of gawpers round it told him all he needed to know. He went into a pub and dialled Renée.

‘It’s Duffy,’ he said. ‘What’s happened?’

‘What’s happened? You’ve fucking ruined Ronnie, that’s all that’s happened. Why the bleedin’ did I ever let you in? What’ve you ever done for me, copper? And now you go and lose my Ronnie all his shops.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘About an hour ago. Heaters through every shop. Frightened the wits out of the punters. All your fault, copper.’

‘I’m not one any more, Renée. And how do you know it’s got anything to do with me? You said yourself that our friend had already threatened Ronnie.’

‘Yeah, well he was going to do only one shop, see? Only you came sniffing to see me. So he rang up Ronnie special, just half an hour ago, to tell him how he had been going to do only one shop, but seeing as I’d been so helpful to you, he’d decided to do all four. So what do you say to that, copper?’

Duffy couldn’t think of anything to say, but it didn’t matter; Renée put the phone down on him.

He sat in the pub for a bit, wondering about what had happened. It was like a blitz. Was Eddy declaring war in every direction at the same time? And why the old parry heater method? It didn’t really work in terms of setting the shop on fire, though it was very sudden and very frightening. It was an old-fashioned technique, used by the generation of, well, Salvatore. Maybe Eddy was being nostalgic, like when he imitated Salvatore’s voice; more likely, he found the lapse into barbarism a nice contrast with his green office, his chintz, his window seats, his soft suits.

After a couple of drinks Duffy wasn’t closer to any answers, but he had begun to relax. The pub was full; he felt safe. He also felt a bit randy. Maybe he should have pocketed a few of the uncharred mags from McKechnie’s Christmas stock. As he sat and thought about it, he definitely did feel randy. It was now almost a week since the future author of the
Good Gay Guide
had dropped his watch into the Tupperware box. Jack had protested that the watch was completely noiseless, the very latest in digital-display quartz technology. Duffy had looked at him sceptically and pointed firmly to the box.

It struck Duffy that one aspect of local life that he hadn’t yet checked out was the massage parlours. If McKechnie were as flourishing a businessman as his fire suggested, he could surely afford to treat Duffy to a little body-rub. Every business allows for a percentage of its turnover going in expenses fiddles. Duffy could always claim that he’d spotted Jeggo diving in for a much-needed sauna and had followed him.

He left the pub and looked up and down Greek Street. No time for a consumer survey, besides, he was only a couple of hundred yards away from Martoff’s headquarters. He put on his punter’s walk, crossed the street, and pushed open the door of Aladdin’s Lamp (‘Executive Massage’). In the little front office sat a middle-aged woman in a white nylon housecoat; she smiled at him in a friendly fashion. It seemed to Duffy like going into a ladies’ hairdresser’s.

‘Um, I’d like a massage please,’ he mumbled. He hadn’t ever used the line before.

‘Of course, dear. Do you want sauna too?’

‘Er, I don’t think so.’

‘Well, you can have single girl for eight pounds; single girl topless for ten; two-girl for twelve, two-girl topless for fourteen.’ Duffy wondered what the rates included; probably not much.

‘How long’s that for?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

Oh well, in for a penny.

‘I’ll have the two-girl topless please.’

‘Very good sir, Number Three, you’ll find a towel in there.’

Duffy handed over fourteen quid (almost a quid a minute, he suddenly thought), and went past the woman’s desk into a narrow corridor. There were a row of cubicles constructed of stripped pine. They didn’t seem very soundproof to him. The lighting was subdued.

He opened Number Three. In the middle was a sort of high narrow bed: mattress, blankets and a top covering of plastic sheeting. A chair for his clothes, with a towel hung over it; a cupboard or two; and a dresser with some oils and powders laid out. He undressed and put the towel round his waist, noticing that it was too small either to go round his waist properly or to cover his pubic region properly. Then he lay down on the bed.

The two girls bubbled cheerfully into the room. They wore cut-off denim shorts and Dr Scholl sandals. One of the girls had small, tight, high breasts; the other larger, more dangly ones; perhaps that was how the pairs went, hedging the clients’ bets.

‘Oil or powder, sir?’ One of the girls was setting a kitchen pinger for twenty minutes.

Duffy couldn’t decide. Wouldn’t oil take a long time to get off? But powder didn’t sound much fun. Oil sounded much sexier.

‘Oil, please.’

They turned him over on his front and began to massage him. One concentrated on his shoulders and back, rubbing oil into him and dipping her tits down every so often and rubbing them against his back; this was the girl with the larger tits, and he certainly knew it. The other girl worked on his legs, getting ever and ever closer to his groin. He felt his erection getting squashed between his thigh and the bed.