The phone rings and the glass smashes in my hand, just as I bring it to my lips.
“Johnny. You know I will have to kill you.”
A smile widens across my face. “How can you kill what’s already dead?”
Twelve Canadians were the first to welcome the next day as they took off from the Grand Union on their way to the much gentler climate of Kew. Their wings making a terrific, terrifying noise. Pete, the cleaner of the Grand Union pub, was mopping up the beer garden; lost in the fight with his wife, who’d said before he left at 5 in the morning, “Panic, stupidity, and withdrawal. That’s all you’ve got to fucking offer.”
“Fuck away from me.”
When he first heard the noise, he almost dropped dead believing, This is it, expecting Osama himself in a Harrier jet, with eleven henchmen in tow.
Pint and eleven white wines for the ladies?
Pete was mysteriously taken by the magnificence of those beasts and marveled in slow motion when they, first down low and then rising up under the Halfpenny Step Bridge, yelled out as they made their ascent, “What a beautiful sight!”
He looked around to see if Carmel was about.
“Carmel, you should see this. Come here.”
Carmel shook her head from inside the pub, and thinking about her eldest daughter’s latest abortion, snapped, “What is it now? Don’t you fucking play games with me, because I’m in no mood.”
Carmel threw a rag down and turned again to see Pete standing there like a frozen statue. She laughed to herself and walked out toward him. “What’s got you all fucking excited?”
Pete was still motionless, as though aliens had taken his soul. He was now white as a sheet. “Jesus.”
“Oh yeah? And I suppose the fucking holy Virgin Mother of Mary, too...” Carmel’s voice trailed off, as now she understood.
Tied by the wrists to the railing under the bridge.
Black tights pulled tight around her white neck.
Eyes, nose, ears, fingers, and lips removed.
Half-submerged in the canal.
Dead as a fucking doornail.
Legs severed at the thighs.
Red hair ablaze.
Senseless.
Legless.
Beneath the sound of sirens, my view is as always: stark, sullen, and eldritch. I’m prone to believe that it’s a vile and disgusting world above.
Where I’ll die, the Harrow Road Police Station, now a hive of cordoned-off activity — choppers and coppers setting the landscape on fire — is to my right. Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Vincent de Paul, where in less than half an hour I will asseverate Mass before a shaken community, is to my left.
A community brought together by God only knows whom.
A community of chargrins and fighters.
A community no less.
Fighters for peace.
Secondhand peace.
Crime Time West Nine.
Meanwhile.
Gardens.
Animals.
Birds.
Amen.
Part II
I Fought the Law
I fought the lawyer
by Michael Ward
Mayfair
I pressed PLAY and the screen on the dinky digital camcorder came to life. Vanya’s face the only thing in view, gurning and sticking her tongue out as a kind of visual “testing, testing...” before disappearing.
Good girl.
From where the camera was positioned on top of the wardrobe, it takes in about half the room. In the far right-hand corner is a bed with a large mirror next to it, to the left a small chest of drawers, and in between, against the far wall, a coat stand with a French maid’s outfit, a leather basque, and a nurse’s uniform with a white cap; a pair of black thigh-length boots are slumped in front.
Two seconds later Vanya reappears into view, carrying the chair she’d just used to reach the top of the wardrobe, and placing it in its usual position next to the chest of drawers. She looks in the mirror, makes a cursory adjustment to her hair, and smoothes her hands down her slip before exiting the frame stage left to the door that leads to the sitting room.
Ten seconds of stillness, then back to moving pictures as he enters the room. Four slow, graceful strides bring him to the mirror, where he stops to take in his reflection. A tall, slim, handsome man in his early fifties wearing a tastefully expensive dark gray suit offset by a weighty flop of silver hair. The epitome of conservative English style. He runs an index finger over each arched eyebrow, taming any rogue hairs, then turns and unwittingly strikes a face-on, screen-test pose for the camera.
Perfect.
Vanya’s back in the room now, her heels wobbling slightly on the squishy carpet as she walks to the chest of drawers and finds a condom. The gentleman takes off his jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair, then places his shoes neatly underneath. By the time Vanya has rolled the condom over her index finger and greased it thoroughly with Vaseline, the man is naked but for his calf-length thin black socks and has positioned himself on the bed, facing away from the camera, bearing his arse to it.
Vanya kneels behind him on the bed, still in her slip and shoes, and gently greases the QC’s rectal area, accompanying the finger strokes with a softly murmured Croatian lullaby. Mamu ti jebem u guzicu. She gently eases the digit inside and begins finger-fucking the man, her Serbo-Croat mantra rising in volume as the pace of the thrusts quickens. Picka. Mamu ti jebem u guzicu... About one minute later the silver-haired gentleman, wanking furiously now, reaches his climax and the transaction is complete.
I press STOP.
Got the cunt.
Time to rewind.
The previous week — the previous millennium, in fact — I’d been at the River of Fire. The government had organized the Thames to be set on fire on the stroke of midnight. It was going to be an almighty twenty-stories-high flaming surge of orange-and-red pyrotechnic power bursting through the heart of the city at 800 miles an hour. PM Turns Water into Fire; Elemental Alchemy on the Grandest of Scales. But all anyone got were a few oversized candles fizzling away on some barges along a muddy river.
Not that I gave a fuck. Fabrication, fabrication, fabrication. I knew those sloganeering cunts would never deliver. I wasn’t there for the show. I was there to steal stuff from unsuspecting thick cunts. And unsuspecting thick cunts do deliver. Copiously.
I wasn’t doing it for the money — though some of the stuff I nicked did come in handy later. It just needed to be done. With all that sense of hope and expectation for the dawning of a new millennium, someone had to restore the balance. Inject a bit of reality into the situation. These people were supposed to be slick city folk, weren’t they? Experts at the urban experience. Come to London. Where the people are such cunts they piss and shit and vomit on their own streets while a bunch of incompetent failed lawyers-turned-slogan-peddlers fuck them up the arse and make them pay for the pleasure.
So I put on my own show. Illegal performance art. A one-off special for a discerning audience of — me. Creative theft. Taking and giving. No one else would’ve got it anyway. It was a world away from the ham-fisted gippos and hood rats who worked Oxford Street and the tubes. Banging into tourists with an awkward fumble into their pockets and coming away with the odd one-day travel pass to sell on for two quid. The occasional mobile. No sense of style, no originality. No drama. Mine was a virtuoso performance — just me, my rucksack, and my pair of dextrous pals: Right-hand Man and his partner, Leftie. Dab hands, the both of them. Digitally precise, you might say. Got to keep them at arm’s length though. You see? It’s called style, cunt. Wit! Something those fucks will never have. I take and I give. It’s art, fucking art.