“He’ll get over it, woman,” rumbled Brendan, fishing in his trouser pockets. He produced the familiar, to Alex, wad of twenty-pound notes and peeled one off. “Here, give him this and tell him if he can’t take a joke he shouldn’t have joined.”
Mrs Powolny declined the money. “Yes, and how many times have we heard you come out with that one, Mr Barton? But I’m afraid this time the joke’s on you. He’s gone. He’s walked out.”
“Oh, yes?” said Brendan affably. “Did he take the cutlery?”
Right, yeh yeh yeh, this was all very entertaining and Alex would have to remember that line about did he take the cutlery, but on the other hand he was starving hungry.
“Any chance of a steak and chips, luv?” he asked plaintively, as Mrs Powolny turned on her heel.
“I’m sorry, sir, we’re closing.”
“What about a doggy bag for the duck?” roared Brendan after her, but she was already barging through the green baize door.
“Come on, Brendan, let’s have it away on our toes to Mr Wong’s in Wardour Street,” persuaded Stephan Dance.
Allowing Dance to help him to his feet, Brendan Barton found himself still clutching his wad of twenty-pound notes. He transferred his gaze from the bundle of notes to Alex, at the same time trading in the glance for a glare.
“Oh, yes! Reminds me. That young bugger there owes me fifty pounds.”
Alex felt himself going white, but decided on a policy of silence.
“Talking to you, son,” prompted Stephan Dance politely.
“Don’t know what he’s on about,” mumbled Alex. He would be sweating in a minute. Oh, Christ, don’t let him sweat.
“You allowed me to overcharge myself,” said Brendan, swaying. “The agreement was a hundred to a hundred and fifty, according to the quality of the service. I have no complaints against the service, that I’ll grant you, young feller-me-lad, but taking advantage of my condition, that’s to say rat-arsed, you went off with two hundred smackeroos.”
Alex was aghast. The prat was babbling away as if the whole world knew his business. And here was he, Alex, sitting next to a fookin reporter from the fookin press. Not, he had to acknowledge, that James Flood looked that much interested. But mebbe he wasn’t as good a reporter as all that.
Ludicrously trying to keep his voice down, since there was nothing he might say in whatever undertone he could manage that would not be heard by the others present, he said — hissed, almost: “I thought you didn’t want that stuff to get about.”
“Oh, do be your age, sunshine, don’t you ever read your Private Eye? I’m notorious. Bottoms-up Brendan, I’m known as, I thought everyone knew that. What I didn’t want the world and his wife to know was that, mistakenly as it now seems, I was paying you over top whack if you’ll excuse the expression. Seventy-five is the going rate, I paid you double the going rate for a double blessing, so to speak, but then you took me for a further fifty which is unforgivable. Poppy up.”
Jesus, had the bugger no shame? Apparently not. He was standing with his outstretched palm level with Stephan Dance’s waistline, which made it worse.
“Sorry, Brendan, I was a bit pissed. I wasn’t counting.”
“Nevertheless.”
“If you pay the gentleman,” said Stephan Dance, “we can all leave in an orderly manner.”
What the alternative was to leaving in an orderly manner he didn’t specify, but there was no doubt in Alex’s mind that there was one. Nevertheless, he bluffed: “But I don’t have it on me.” After all, so all right, he’d been dropped two hundred, but thirty of that had already gone on that old bat’s book, another fifty back to Brendan would take it down to a hundred and twenty, and where did a hundred and twenty go in this fookin town? It was only just after ten.
“Get it,” suggested Stephan Dance, with chilling firmness. He felt in his top pocket for a visiting card. “Fetch it round here.” Eve’s Erotica. Adult video’s — book’s — mag’s. Sale or rent. “Open till midnight,” added the porn king helpfully.
“What if I haven’t got it by then?” asked Alex brashly.
“My son, you’ll turn into a pumpkin,” said Stephan Dance, and sounded as if he meant it. “Off we jolly go, Brendan.”
In a near-zombie trance, Brendan Barton suffered himself to be led out. Alex was left alone with James. Mrs Powolny reappeared, in her outdoor coat, and pointedly began to turn off table lamps.
“Don’t forget this,” said James as they rose. It was the scruffed-up manuscript of Freeze When You Say That, by Kim Grizzard.
Oh, shit. Alex had tried to leave it with the receptionist over at Silhouettes, but she had not unreasonably declined to take possession of it on the basis that Kim Grizzard was now barred from the restaurant for life and beyond.
“Try not to lose it,” advised James. “You’re in enough doo-doo as it is.”
As they passed out into Romilly Street Alex asked: “That bollox about soup spoons — were they pulling our plonkers or what?”
The Soho correspondent of the London Examiner shrugged. “It doesn’t do to question what’s bollox and what’s not around here. Especially in my job, such as it is.”
Across the street Len Gates, furled umbrella raised so that he could be identified by stragglers, had gathered another small band of tourists about him in a pool of lamplight.
“Jesus Christ, doesn’t he ever stop?” said Alex. “I wonder he doesn’t get blurry laryngitis.”
“This is his ghost walk,” explained James. “Very popular, I gather. Conducted tour of all the haunted spots in Soho.”
“Stuff me! How many are there supposed to be, then?”
“Depends on the number of punters and the state of the weather.”
They meandered across Romilly Street, within hailing distance of Len’s braying voice but beyond the range of his collecting hat.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the excellent Pizza Plaza before you now was in days gone by a very very famous seafood house known as Strong’s Fish Restaurant. And if you would look upwards, you will see set into the wall the ceramic lobster which was the emblem, the logo as it would nowadays be termed, of the Strong family’s little chain of restaurants.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, the last Mr Strong who ran this very restaurant, used to tell this story himself. That when he was manager here he regularly had the experience of finding himself, in the early hours, sprawled at the foot of the very steep flight of cellar steps, his explanation being that he was deliberately pushed down them. By whom, ladies and gentlemen? Mr Strong always maintained that it was the shade of a certain Mrs Kark who had been manageress before the Strong family took the establishment over, and that this was her way of paying him out after passing to the other side. A more mundane explanation was that Mr Strong was frequently to be seen in liquor. Who is to say? Only the ghosts of Soho know.”
“Does he make this stuff up as he goes along?” asked Alex as they moved on towards the Coach and Horses.
“Put it this way,” said James Flood. “The last time I heard him spin that yarn he was standing outside what used to be the old Hungaria restaurant in Coventry Street, and the ghost was an old waiter who’d been fired and was then run over by a cab on his way across to Lyons’ Corner House.”
“Oh, yes, and did he take the cutlery?” asked Alex, echoing Brendan Barton.
“Well may you ask.”
“Now before we move on to the site of the old Royalty Theatre and the ghost of its late owner Fanny Kelly, ladies and gentlemen, let me draw your attention back to the Strong family’s lobster emblem on the wall there. Those of you who have vouchers for luncheon at the Mermaid Room of the Cambridge Eurotel tomorrow may care to notice that many of the fish forks in that restaurant are stamped with that very same lobster emblem. Now how did those fish forks come to be transferred from what was Strong’s seafood house to the Mermaid Room? Thereby, ladies and gentlemen, hangs a tale …”