Mr. Love and Justice (8 page)

‘Okay dear,’ said Edward. ‘You check with your friend and find out what the score is on the financial side, and I’ll consult files and sources – very discreetly, of course – to find if anything’s known to us about it. If both things tally, well, let’s move in. I’m really getting tired, when I see you, of having to act as if I was a criminal.’

‘The key money may be quite a bit,’ she said. ‘Something like fifty, I should imagine.’

Edward winced. ‘Well, that’s not the chief difficulty,’ he said. ‘Our chief obstacle is the place: if we find that’s all right, the money will look after itself – it’ll have to.’

He pressed her two arms, but only so, because the place was too public now for kissing; and each of them felt as well that the unknown tenants of the block were already curious neighbours. He ran for a bus and sat in a rear seat, eyeing his fellow travellers with the proprietory air of his profession as if they were all (and, indeed, the entire population of our islands) the potential inhabitants of some vast, imaginary jail. Passing the Metropolitan theatre of varieties he glanced out idly, and immediately left the bus. For he had noticed a person there whom an inborn and constantly developing instinct told him he should watch and follow.

This person set off along the Harrow Road in the direction of the monumental metal bridges over the tangle of lines just outside Paddington railway station. The person’s glances at certain passing citizens, all of a particular nature, confirmed Edward’s suspicions of his hopes. At a square green metal urinal stuck on to a tall wall like a carbuncle, the person paused, gazed around (Edward was standing blandly at a bus stop), and entered. Five minutes elapsed: too long for nature and for innocence, and Edward pounced.

The design of male urinals, in England, and especially those dating from the heroic period of pre-World War I construction, has to be witnessed to be believed. For this simplest of acts, what one can only describe as temples, or shrines, have been erected. The larva-hued earthenware, the huge brass pipes, the great slate walls dividing the compartments, are all built on an Egyptian scale. Each visitor is isolated from his neighbour, though so close to him and in such physical communion, as if in a sort of lay confessional. Horrendous notices advising not to spit in the only place in the city where it wouldn’t matter in the slightest, and warnings against fell diseases that can nowadays be cured by a few cordial jabs by a nurse in either buttock, abound, as do those reminding visitors about what their mothers taught them when, at the age of three or so, they were put into their first short pants. All this seems to bear witness to a really sensational and alarming fear and hatred of the flesh, even in its most natural functions, that inspired the municipal Pharaohs who designed
these places. And from their ludicrous solemnity, ribald inscriptions on the walls of a political, erotic, or merely autobiographical nature are an agreeable light relief.

As Edward expected, the person he had followed was up to no good at all and taking his place casually and, as it were, sympathetically in the adjacent compartment, he waited for his victim to make a fatal gesture. This, sure enough, he did. Whereupon Edward, making sure they were alone together, stepped quickly back behind the evildoer, said, ‘I’m an officer of the law: I want to speak to you outside,’ and hustled his prisoner out, barely giving him time to obey the injunction of an infantile nature just described.

Edward hurried his case along with a firm and dexterous grip, yet one which to a casual observer might seem that of a companion – perhaps a bit over-demonstrative, but certainly not ill-disposed. Round a corner, and over the western railway, they reached a lofty and secluded street.

Edward had said nothing yet (nor had the prisoner) and was, in fact, not quite sure what he was going to say. A charge of this kind, at the station, was always the subject of facetious comment, and on the part of a young CID man would certainly be esteemed detrimental to his prestige. In addition, as Edward well knew, there was the complication that it is very difficult to make such charges stick if the officer arrests the prisoner alone. In such a case, if the prisoner denies with resolution, it is one man’s word against
another’s; and though the courts will probably believe the copper’s, they prefer corroborative evidence and are apt to dismiss the case if they don’t get it. The whole exploit was, in fact, an optimistic stab in a considerable darkness, and Edward had already decided to turn the prisoner loose after one of those lecturettes so gratifying to a young officer’s ego. But at this moment the prisoner uttered plaintively the magic words, ‘Officer, can’t we talk this thing over?’

Any experienced copper knows instantly what this means. For unless the prisoner is an imbecile – that
does
happen, of course – he will know perfectly well there’s no point whatever in talking anything over once the arrest is made, unless …

Edward stopped, backed the prisoner against a mews wall, still holding him firmly and discreetly, and said to him, ‘Well?’

‘I’m in your hands,’ the prisoner said, ‘and I don’t want this thing to go any further. I’m a married man.’

‘So?’ Edward said.

There was a slight pause as they eyed each other well beyond the eyes. ‘I’ve got a fiver in my pocket if you’ll let me get at it,’ the prisoner said.

‘Have you?’ said Edward, gazing at his victim with implacable denial. ‘You know what an offer of that nature means?’

‘I’ve got six or seven in all,’ the prisoner said. ‘That’s all I’ve got, honest: you can search me.’

‘Who are you?’ said Edward.

‘I’d rather not say my name.’

‘Wouldn’t you! Tell me what’s your job.’

‘Salesman.’

‘Of what?’

‘Vacuum cleaners.’

‘With a suit like that? And that wrist watch?’ Edward gave the man a wrench.

‘All right. Car salesman. And I’ll make it twenty.’

Edward, still holding him, put his face closer and said low, slow, and distinctly, ‘You’ll make it fifty. And you’ll tell me where you work, and at exactly this time tomorrow –
exactly
, you understand me? – I’ll be calling there
with
a colleague. And you, you’ll have made arrangements to meet us alone in some room there – I don’t care
where
– and hand me what I said, singles and not new ones
and
unmarked please, in a plain envelope, and then I’ll forget about the whole matter and so will you. If you’ve got any ideas of seeing a lawyer or having any sort of reception committee for me, that’s up to you. But don’t forget my story will be – and it’ll be ready for filing by tonight at the station – that I was unable to arrest you because on more important duties, but you attempted to commit an offence and attempted bribery to an officer in the due course of his duties. Is that quite clear?’

‘I haven’t got that money,’ the prisoner said.

‘Then you’ll
get
it.’

‘Fifty’s a lot,’ he cried.

‘Quietly! So’s a few weeks in the nick. You’re certainly not a first offender …’

‘I’ve never had a conviction …’

‘We’ll soon put that right for you if you don’t do as I say. And one last thing. If you try to cross me over this you may get away with it, and you may not, but believe me, son, whatever embarrassment it might cause me, a lot of my colleagues in the Force won’t like it at all, and once we’ve got the needle into a man that’s shopped an officer, particularly a man like you, we’ll see it goes in deep and
hurts
you.’

Edward gave the man a sharp twist and abruptly released him. ‘Very well, officer,’ he said. ‘It’ll be as you say.’

Edward looked at him, said nothing for a moment, and then after collecting some particulars briskly (as if at the prisoner’s request), turned and walked away. Like a young soldier in battle who shoots and is shot at the first time, he felt pure elation: far greater than that in distant earlier days, of his first uniformed arrest. Then, as professional prudence descended on him again, he meditated on all the angles he could see so far. The rendezvous at the man’s own office seemed to him the master-stroke. For what officer, suspected of corruption, would ever go to fetch a bribe in so compromising a place? Righteous indignation could greet any such suggestion! The only tricky moment would be leaving the office with the envelope. But he wouldn’t: he’d bring the man out
with
the envelope, and take it from him somewhere else.

There only remained, so far as he could see, one problem: where to keep the money once he had it. Obviously, it would be imprudent to put even a 
relatively small lump sum like this in the Post Office savings – his only bankers. And perhaps as time passed, the sums might well get larger. And so? He must try to find out what the precedents in this matter in the Force might be, and even possibly consult his girl about it also.

Frankie and his woman were well settled in: and hitherto, so far as they could see, had attracted no undue attention. Key money had been duly paid to the janitor of the block of flats they’d chosen – but since this was normal practice, excited no untoward remark. Frankie, though he still had no job, departed at fairly regular intervals as if to work, and was careful to remain quite soberly dressed – as much, so it happened, by inclination as by prudence. His girl put it about (but very casually, and without overdoing it at all) that her man had had an accident at sea and had retired, though so young, from active duty. Everyone knew, of course, that they weren’t married; but this state of affairs was far from unusual among the tenants as a whole. As for the very essential maid to assist the girl in her profession, they’d decided to do without one, both for caution’s sake and for the following reason.

It was clearly necessary to have, if
asked
(no need to volunteer the information otherwise), an explanation of the visitors to Frankie’s flat. Of course, in the girl’s new status in her calling, the prices had gone up from those of Stepney days, so that fewer clients paid a greater total; but still some reason might be needed, not, perhaps, that there were so many visitors, but that so many of them – almost all, in fact – were men. In this dilemma, Frankie’s woman had recourse to her old mum: who being part gypsy, practised as faith-healer, in which art, over the years, she’d built up a considerable clientele especially among what one might call the contemporary
levellers
: small, nonconformist trades people who scorned received religions, scorned hospitals (except when, as sometimes happened, they were carried in there to die), scorned dignity and the intellect – scorned everything except the dogmatic certitude of their own infallibility.

The faith-healing Mum was reluctant to shift her practice entirely from Walthamstow, where she was a figure of some local weight, to Kilburn; nor did Frankie, who didn’t care much for the old lady, wish to have her living in the flat. Accordingly she came across, often transported by a gratefully healed patient with a car-hire business, on certain evenings and afternoons; and to those who were at all curious about Frankie’s woman the hint was dropped that the mother was initiating her daughter into the mysteries of her healing art.

The Mum, whose own legal record was unblemished, knew all she needed to about her girl’s activities and accepted them entirely without censure. In her eyes, her
daughter had not ‘gone wrong’ but merely gone slightly bent. Her attitude, perhaps, resembled that of an Inland Revenue collector whose daughter, unpredictably, has chosen to become an air-hostess: a tricky, odd profession, but one of evident advantage and repute. To Frankie she was far from cordial. She quite accepted the need for his existence, just as the hypothetical collector would have done the need of his daughter to be associated, professionally, with a pilot. It was just that she didn’t
like
him: thought him a bit superior, ungrateful and, possible worse, untrustworthy.

The girl had furnished the flat in decorous and thoroughly petty-bourgeois style: it startlingly resembled those of countless other tenants of the building with its furnishings which, though solid, rather overstated their real degree of luxury. As the flat was quite exiguous, Frankie had caused some inconvenience by absolutely refusing to allow the bed he shared with her, to be shared by anyone else. Another, disguised as a ‘divan’, was therefore imported into the living-room, taking up too much space and forcing the Mum (and indeed Frankie, on the rare occasions he was present during business hours) to move into the kitchen, or his own bedroom. But as no arrangement, whatever, here below, is ever precisely as each one of the parties involved would wish it, the various give-and-takes were generally accepted. What anyone else, including the janitor, thought of the set-up – if they did think of it at all – remained unknown. But in prostitution, as in all other businesses, if reasonable precautions are
taken any troubles are best not nervously foreseen, but resolutely faced if they should arise.

The routine of a call-girl had, for Frankie, one very big surprise. The life of a street whore in Stepney, from the little he’d seen of it, was certainly not lacking in incident and colour; and for street-girls in general, he supposed, excitement of some kind or other had been the order of every day. But for a girl ‘on the phone’ the life was colourless and business-like in the extreme. Those who telephoned, and who were never accepted unless already known or strongly recommended and never, even then, if proposing to bring strangers or manifestly drunk, arrived discreetly and departed likewise: even more anxious, it seemed, than Frankie’s girl was, not to get involved in ‘anything’.

There were as was inevitable occasional ‘incidents’, at none of which, hitherto, Frankie had himself been present – except once or twice off-stage in the capacity of number-one reserve; but on such occasions the troublemaker had to face the formidable duo of Frankie’s woman and her mum or even – still formidable enough – Frankie’s girl, operating solo. For she had the gift, common to most women and even the unrespectable, of making any man who steps out of line from the particular convention that he shares for the moment with her appear, even to himself, to be crudely and abysmally
wrong
.

Occasionally when Frankie timed things badly, rather dreary little tea-parties took place between himself, his girl, and her appalling mum: on which
occasions he was much vexed by their custom of ignoring him almost, or of treating him at best as a visitor in his own home or as a sort of bright young cousin: indispensable in his way, as all men must be admitted to be, but superfluous to so many of the vital feminine preoccupations. These trios would sometimes lead to rows and even, when Frankie and his girl were left alone, to violence: but it was difficult to quarrel with them, because they greeted his resentment with such totally unfeigned surprise. What on earth was eating up the boy? Goodness! he must be right out of his foolish mind!

‘If an agent takes the money from the
girl
,’ Frankie’s woman was explaining in a conversation with her mother about the legal technicalities of brothel-keeping, ‘that’s an offence, yes, but not if he takes it from the
man
.’

They both glanced at Frankie.

‘As things are here, though,’ said the mother, ‘the question doesn’t seem to me to arise.’

‘Oh, no!’ said the girl, ‘of course not. Not in a straight gaff with one girl, no. But if the place is crooked with a few of them, and the agent knows it and he takes money from the girl, then the law says he’s a brothel-keeper even though he’s not the landlord.’

‘But not if he takes it from the man.’

‘No, Mum.’

‘Then we do have our uses,’ Frankie said.

The women both smiled politely and a bit impatiently.

‘All the same,’ the old Mum said, ‘I should say with the new laws making it difficult for the girls out on the
streets, the crooked landlords are going to play an even bigger part than they used to do before.’

‘Naturally. And you know, Mum, it’s a funny thing. In the old days on the streets, in spite of all you read of in the Sundays, the business wasn’t really organised to all that great extent. Among the foreign girls, yes, maybe, but most of our girls just did their own deals with the landlords. But now, with the question of rooms becoming so important, I shouldn’t be surprised to see that kind of an estate-agent, and the hospitality bureaus and such, moving in on the thing in a very much bigger way.’

‘That’s the trouble about laws,’ the mother said, pouring another great gurgling cup of tea. Her daughter continued,

‘The people who pass them just don’t know a thing first hand, and when they set out to alter things for the better as they call it, they end up by making them far worse. Now, take the game. Up till a year ago, it was broadly speaking single operators, single girls. Now it’s going to be big business, and go all commercial. But there you are. Here in England they think that if a thing goes on behind closed doors, it’s better. In fact though, as we’re going to see, it’s worse. I mean different, anyway.’ The girl sipped ruminatively. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘why they don’t just leave us alone. Why it is they hate us so.’

‘It’s not you they hate,’ Frankie said, ‘it’s us – and I’ll tell you why.’

The two women turned and eyed him as do adults when a bright child who’s overheard an adult
conversation chips in with a remark that will be possibly idiotic, possibly cute, and just possibly the revelation of an infant wisdom.

‘They hate us,’ said Frankie, ‘so far as I can see for three reasons – possibly more I haven’t thought of.’

Mild curiosity sat in four female eyes.

‘They
don’t
hate us,’ Frankie said, ‘because we’re wicked, and they’re not.’

The word ‘wicked’ fell on the air with a slight embarrassment on account, in this setting, of its total irrelevance: as if, on a race-track, a jockey had suddenly implied that any doubt was possible about the value of steeple-chasing.

‘Then why do they?’ said the girl.

‘In the first place,’ said Frankie who by now had meditated long and deeply on this theme, ‘they hate us because they put their own guilty feelings on our heads.’

‘They feel
guilty
?’ the Mum said, as if pronouncing an indecent word.

‘Some of them do, Mum,’ said her daughter. ‘As a matter of fact for some of them that’s just the kick.’

‘In the second place,’ Frankie continued, ‘they resent having to pay for what we get free.’

‘Frankie!’ cried the Mum. ‘Don’t be so vulgar!’

‘And in the third,’ he went on, ‘they’re simply jealous of us: cock-jealous, I mean. They know if they did it as well as we do, they wouldn’t need to pay a girl at all.’

‘You’re being disgusting,’ said the Mum.

But her daughter smiled. ‘So now you’ve got
that
off your chest,’ she said, as her mum cleared away the inharmonious tea-things.

She reached over and put her arms round Frankie and just left them there, so that he felt their weight: the only moment when arms – those busy, utilitarian limbs – seem voluptuous as breasts or thighs. ‘You love me, don’t you, Frankie dear?’ she said.

He kissed her hard and comfortably. ‘I don’t
love
you,’ he said with friendly scorn, ‘and you know I don’t. But I certainly like you – and your body, well, it’s strawberries and cream.’

She laughed and pulled free, though easily, when her mum returned, in a way Frankie liked because it showed not deference to the mother, but that her physical life with Frankie was their own concern and no one else’s, not even Mum’s.

‘People are funny,’ the mother observed sagely, seating her huge self (she was one of those women whose very soul seems in their bottoms) and picking up, though at a tangent, some threads of the earlier conversation. ‘When they get an idea they’ve very often no idea what their real idea behind it is. For instance,’ she said, weighing her pendulous elbows on the stalwart table, ‘take healing, such as I do. Well, it’s not for
healing
in point of actual fact that a great many of them come to see me.’ She looked at each of them, as if inviting the real explanation and defying them to utter it. ‘They come,’ she said, ‘simply because they’re lonely and want sympathetic company.’

‘A lot of mine do, too,’ the girl said.

‘Oh, I suppose so,’ said the Mum.

‘That’s what the law and watch committees and busybodies generally don’t realise. A lot of the clients, if they didn’t come to us, would be in mental homes. There’s not a girl, among the nicer ones I mean, who’s not had the experience of straightening out some kinky character and even maybe, who knows? saving his marriage for him, and his home.’

‘That’s a new angle,’ Frankie said.

‘Don’t be sarcastic, Frank,’ the mother told him.

‘All I’m trying to show you, Frankie,’ said his girl, ‘is that they’re just as wrong, often, to hate us as they are to hate men like you.’

‘Live and let live,’ said the mother, ‘is my motto. But as a matter of fact, so far as the law’s concerned I don’t think they’re unreasonable: I mean the older, more experienced officers. They bear no malice usually. They just follow the book of rules.’

‘Except for the ones that provoke you,’ the girl said, ‘or frame you, or try to take advantage of their position, I’d agree with you more or less.’

‘Who does that leave?’ said Frankie.

‘Oh, quite a lot of them. I’ve even had clients among the Force,’ the girl said demurely.

‘But a lot of them are bent, just like you say,’ said Frankie. ‘Well, come to think of it, don’t they
have
to be? I don’t mean the station-sergeants, or the men on the beat who help old ladies across zebras, but the bright boys, the vice people, the CID. I just ask you this: how can they possibly catch real criminals unless they understand what goes on in their minds?’

The women gazed at him as he uttered this subversive thought.

‘So far as I can see,’ said Frankie, ‘the coppers are simply criminals who don’t happen to
commit
crimes – not usually, anyway – because their graft, their occupation, is not that but to
detect
them. But they’ve got the criminal mentality all right. Well, I mean: just take a look at some of their faces, ’specially the eyes! And those bodies! All sticking out in awkward, unexpected places – so peculiar!’

‘I think you’re exaggerating,’ the mother said, after a pause.

‘Oh, sure!’ said Frankie. ‘And besides, I’ve no experience, you may say. Why! Think of it! I haven’t even been inside the nick yet, except for those nautical little episodes in foreign parts …’

‘Now, now, dear,’ his girl said gently.

‘Don’t get me wrong!’ said Frankie, who was beginning to feel that most delicious of intoxications, the excitement of an
idea
, and like all drunkards cared less and less, as it inspired him, whether his audience was also drunk, or no. ‘I’m not against coppers like some people are. I don’t hate them or anything – not at all: why bother? All I say is they
are
like that, they’re bound to be like that, and what’s wrong with the set-up in this country is not what
they
are, but what all the mugs
think
they are: because the facts about them aren’t generally understood and, anyway, most people just don’t want to
know
.’