“Joe, you did fine,” Mercer says. “You were great. But there is no question that we are in the shit. We are in the savage jungle. For some reason, which I do not yet apprehend, there are titans stirring in the deeps and shadows on the stairwell. As my youngest cousin Lawrence would say, we are up to our necks in podu. This, incidentally, is Reggie, who is one of my occasional thugs,” indicating the gnarled youth on his left. “Now retiring to become a vet, would you believe, but for the next ten minutes you can trust him with your life, only don’t, trust me instead. Anyway … good evening, and what the fuck is going on, and try the lamb, it’s excellent.”
Because Mercer, good as his word, has brought a picnic.
Below the thunders of the upper mezzanine, behind the first of three vast tungsten-alloy security doors, Noblewhite Cradle maintains a suite too elegantly attired and well-plumbed to be called a panic room, but too well-fortified and paranoid to be anything else. Joe is a little disappointed, but also massively relieved, to find that he is not actually lodged in the fortress itself. It is on the sofa in the Raspberry Lounge—which may be thought of as the barbican of Noblewhite Cradle—amid the deep pink cushions and highlights of damask, that he falls asleep for a full hour before Mercer rouses him by placing under his nose a mug of thick coffee made in the approved Noblewhite fashion, so that it tastes the way fresh coffee actually smells. Mathew Spork, in the olden, golden days, used to say that he only ever got caught in the act when he really needed some of Jonah Noblewhite’s home-brew. Nach dem Grossmütterart, Jonah Noblewhite would respond in gentle remonstrance. Not mine, Mathew. My grandmother’s, and Joe’s father would say Yes, Jonah, we know. In all our Earthly strivings for perfection, we shall none of us reach the greatness of the foremothers. And whether the conversation took place in this bolt-hole or in the great mustard-yellow living room in the Mathew Spork mansion in moderately unfashionable Primrose Hill, there was Joe listening and absorbing it all, and thinking his father was a leader of men and a ruler of thousands.
“Hail, the conquering hero! All hail!” Mathew Spork cries, five foot eight and lean as a river trout, his arms thrown up as if to display the trophy, then snapping down to receive, not a great silver chalice, but Harriet Spork in a great fluster.
Mathew wraps himself around her and lifts her up and murmurs horsewhispers in her ear, and kisses her soundly on the mouth until she stops speaking (which is quite some time) and strokes her like a much-unsettled cat. She soothes, and slows the stream of questions and remonstrance, and remembers to include in their embrace the boy they made.
Joshua Joseph scrambles up his father’s suit and perches between his parents, much delighted by this position, and presses their heads together with infant muscle, so that their noses squash, and this causes a great volcano of laughter from all three.
The source of Harriet’s alarm is never precisely stated, but earlier this same day some enterprising scoundrel concealed himself in a purloined armoured truck and managed to gain access to the Bridlington Fisheries & Farming Mutual Lending Society, from whence—with the aid of three further gangsters, identities unknown—he secured some two and a quarter million pounds and diverse objects of value totalling yet more.
The tommy gun was not in its box this morning when Joshua Joseph sneaked into his father’s study, and there was a smell of oil on the workbench. Imagining what great works must be afoot, Joshua Joseph laid his hand across the velvet dips and forms of the case and tried to imagine the heft of the thing, the coolness of it, before his mother found him and chased him out. Now, though, he understands that another blow has been struck by the grand House of Spork against the iniquitous forces of the financial community.
So tonight is the victory bash, in the shag-pile carpeted, chromed and bear-skinned lower floors of the Primrose Hill house, there on the corner of Chalcot Square. Everyone who is anyone is here. Over by the bar with an oyster in each fist is Umberto Andreotti the tenor, talking dog-racing with Big Douggie who is out on bail and thinking he may need to spend some time abroad. Eyeing them both with speculation is Alice Rebeck, until recently a geisha and still dressed like one. But something in her face says to be careful; Alice has given up the oldest profession. She has business in hand with clients around the world. “Retrievals,” she tells Mathew politely, and “people, darling, not objects” when he asks if there’s anything he might have run across that she’s needing returned (ho ho, huge wink: the gentleman thief returning his stolen goods as a gesture to a lady). Smoothly stepping in to occupy her time is Rolf McCain of the Glasgow McCains, the best family of housebreakers in the business, the cleanest, the fastest, and the most loyal. Rolf was party to one of Mathew’s more splendid crimes, that business with the brontosaurus. He was nearly sent down for it and never breathed a word. The McCains never turn on a friend, not ever, not in two hundred years and more of solid crookery, but that doesn’t mean Rolf will let Mathew monopolise Alice. Even a generous Scotsman must draw the line at that.
On a sofa of his own for obvious reasons is the Honourable Donald (known as Hon Don), unfavoured son of the grand banking house of Lyon & Quintock, indentured into the civil service and utterly desperate to get his rocks off as many times as possible before the inevitable blue-blood bride. Swaddled in Savile Row and primped by experts, noted habitué of brothels from Bangor to Bangalore, the Hon Don is a redhead in the vein of Peter the Great, a wet-eyed sex maniac with thin arms and enormous hands, each of which is presently occupied with the exploration of a different doxy of the day: the curvaceous Anna and the sagacious—if lewd—Dizzy.
“ ’Lo, Hon Don!” bellows Mathew, and “ ’Lo, Dizzy, ’lo Anna!”
“Hullo, Mathew, hullo indeed,” carols back the amorous octopus, and then there is a shriek of outrage, because Anna has goosed him. They fall en groupe over the back of the sofa into the mess of cushions, and it is revealed that all three are wearing suspenders, although (for which relief, much thanks) the Hon Don’s are of the respectable sock variety. For sheer devilment, Mathew snaps off a picture, and there’s another cry of outrage from Donald, “Spork, you bastard, you’ll ruin me! Wait! Wait! Wait! Did you get Anna’s calves? Well, did you get Dizzy’s? Bloody hell, I want that picture! Can you get me a copy? Wey-hey, Spork’s the lad, he bloody is! Ho ho, me young lovelies, now I can take you with me wheresoe’er I go!” And more, but it’s muffled in lace and laughter.
All around, lounging aristocrats and whipcord sportsmen, singers and entertainers including—to Joe’s vast retrospective embarrassment—a noted cabaret act in which a white man from Torquay paints his face and sings Louis Armstrong numbers. But this is the seventies, remember, and no one bats an eye, least of all the three West Indian Cricketers or the Sudanese princeling who turn up at midnight to demand a dance with the great Harriet after she’s sung her set. If Mathew has one redeeming feature, it is an absolute lack of prejudice.
Joshua Joseph loves them all. In miniature flares and a cowhide double-breasted jacket from Tickton’s, he dogs his father’s footsteps as Mathew congratulates a new MP on his win and steals a kiss from the man’s overspilling wife, then dives behind the bar at the urging of Dave Tregale—the casino boss who’s making his way in the world with a few favours from the House of Spork. To the delight of the multitude, Dave pours absinthe and sugar into a shot glass and sets it on fire, and Mathew drops the lot into his mouth and closes his lips on the flames. Joe waits for steam to come out of his father’s ears, and so, it seems, does everyone else. Mathew tosses the glass in the air with a flourish, rolls it down his arm onto the table and grins. “That’s a man’s drink, David, and not a word of a lie!”
After which nothing will answer but that Dave do the trick for a Soviet Cultural Attaché, third class, lately arrived after the opera and gasping for a snifter. Very shortly the bespectacled Russian is singing and dancing and the whole crowd is thumping on the floor, faster and faster, and beside Tovarich Boris (whose name is not Boris) is Mathew Spork, matching him kick f
or kick and spin for spin. Hoy hoy HOY!
Yet all these are just appetisers for the young Joe. His favourite thing comes later, when the guests are mostly gone, and he is admitted to an even more select company of adults. When everyone has shimmied and twisted and the conga line is played out; when the Funkin’ Walrus and Lady Goodvibe have gone home, and the respectable, florid faces have departed, Mathew is left with his close court—and the real party begins.
The great treat of robbing a bank—really robbing it, not just grabbing the cash from the registers like a piker and running headlong into twenty coppers when you get home—is looking in the safety deposit boxes and seeing who had what squirrelled away, then arguing over whether to hang on to it or sell it on, and very occasionally uncovering something truly special or bizarre. Mathew once found, in a box from a bank on the Essex coast, a human jawbone wrapped in crumbling cloth, together with a card identifying it as a holy relic of Saint Jerome. In the same box was a collection of erotic icons detailing a very unconventional version of the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Spirit which a second card asserted had been painted by Michelangelo. Even as forgeries, they were unique. If real …
Mathew donated them anonymously to the British Museum, and by coincidence was invited to a string of glamorous parties by the directors. The icons were not widely seen, though the Museum retains them for very special visitors.
Scotch and hot coffee have replaced absinthe. Harriet is smoking a cigarette in a long holder, others have cigars and pipes. The cash money is being counted elsewhere, there’s nothing so dull as watching two accountants tally and cross-check one another, licking their thumbs and getting paper cuts on their fingers, riffling and complaining and trying to enlarge, without appearing to, their one per cent cut, rising on the far side of the table in proportion to the main stack. All the same, Mathew’s working bag is at his feet, clanking when he puts his foot on it, and Joshua Joseph knows the tommy gun is within; it is his father’s iron rule that he does not put it back into the case until the count is done and the tally split.
So here are the safety deposit boxes, all in rows, and warming up to a box each are the best and most dishonest locksmiths in the country: Aunt Caro with a pipe in her yellow buck teeth and a low gown which reveals, as she leans forward, remarkably conical white breasts; Uncle Bellamy in his sheepskin, even here, indoors and hot as a greenhouse, and sweat coming down his red face from his comb-over; and Uncle Freemont, born in Bermuda and possessed of spiderlong hands, with his half-moon specs on the end of his nose and a hat in Haile Selassie’s colours to remind everyone to show some respect.
“Are you ready?” Mathew Spork demands from the sofa, where Harriet has her stockinged legs across his lap and is shuffling closer to snuggle against him.
They nod. Of course they are. Tensioners and picks in little glimmering lines, rakes in different sizes. Each pouch also contains a few bump keys, not for the competition, but for later, when it’s just about getting through the haul.
“Three, two, one … get ’em open!” Because this is a race, of great seriousness and intensity. How many boxes can each locksmith open in ten minutes? The outer locks are all the same, of course, but the boxes have a second, inner layer to which each customer must affix a lock of his own. And while they struggle and work the tough inner locks, the neophytes and apprentices whisper to one another about what’s being done. The young Joe learns the secrets of the vise and pin, the shunt and the bump key, the tension and the torsion, all wrapped up in laughter and delight, so that another curious skill is added to his repertoire and to his inner list of tasks whose execution is a joy and a matter for laughter and celebration.
Aunt Caro was the fastest, Joe remembers, muzzy and partway asleep on the Raspberry Room sofa. One might argue that she cheated. On the third round she complained that she was hot, and stripped off her top half altogether, letting everything hang out. Broad, muscular shoulders beaded with sweat, strong hands twisting, she carried on. The two men just watched and then Uncle Freemont asked her outright to marry him, to which she replied she’d never marry a man without credentials. She made the word sound so dirty even the infant Joe understood vaguely that this was about sex. Aunt Caro, with a mouth full of bad dentition and roomy about the bust and flank, was all the same a woman with a direct line to the male libido. They left together to pursue the formalities in private.
That merry evening marked the beginning of the end for Mathew Spork. Mathew had come to believe he should shift his game, build a power base and join—at least to some degree—the legitimate economy. The mob had Frank Sinatra, Mathew said. They had movie stars and casinos. Why couldn’t Mathew Spork do the same?
He bought into a chain of newsagents, Post Office concessions, car dealerships, and a pier by the seaside, joined a club called Hawkley’s, and tried without great enthusiasm to restrict himself to low-risk jobs and show thefts. He stole underwear from the bedrooms of visiting starlets and worked very hard to get caught in his domino mask going out of the door. He replaced a set of paste diamonds used in a stage detective story with real ones lifted from the owner’s wife. He lounged and sprawled and took meetings with American businessmen who wanted to touch a genuine English gangster.
And then the eighties came; just-for-fun heisting and games of tag with the coppers were out, and shoulder pads and cocaine were in. Mathew Spork was on a list of people that Lily Law proposed to take down, one way or another.
“I’m sorry, mucker,” Mercer says, “but there’s no help for it.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s five, Joe.”
“I slept the whole day? Fuck! What’s happening?”
“No. It’s five in the morning. You’ve slept an hour. We need to talk about all this. There’s no time, Joe, I’m sorry.”
“Fuck,” says Joshua Joseph Spork again, through the haze, and drinks his coffee. The f-word has become devalued. It doesn’t remotely express how he feels. He remembers his mother, very upset the first time she heard it from his lips, despite the fact she used it on a regular basis to Mathew. These days he can say what he likes unless it’s blasphemy. If he says “Christ” she prays, then weeps. And (Christ) what am I going to tell her?
Mercer lays a small digital recorder on the table.
“From the beginning, Joseph, please.”
“Mercer, I’m tired—”
“You can sleep later. I’m sorry, Joe. Splash some water on your face. If you need more coffee, or some other stimulant, it can be had for you, but we cannot wait for you to nap. It is not nap time. It is talk-with-your-lawyer time, because at this moment I do not know enough to keep you safe.”
Joe scowls. “Just make it go away. Don’t get into it. I’m nothing. I didn’t do anything. I never do. It’s a bad rap.”
“Joseph, I have done several things since you went to sleep. I have initiated all manner of false-arrest proceedings and discovery petitions which will create a paper trail and cause dismay and gnashing of teeth in the House of Titwhistle. I have started researches into the dealings of Billy Friend and his acquaintances unto many generations so that shortly I shall no doubt know more about cadavers and the theft of antiques than I ever dreamed I should. However, these are sideshows, and you know it, and I very much suspect that this is about to get political. If that is the case—if this is national-level statecraft—then the efficacy of Cradle’s to get between you and the villains of the piece will be vastly reduced, because they have recently acquired a nasty habit of ignoring the law. So please, for your own good and the sake of my sanity, tell me what has passed and what is going on. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, I have stepped in the path of Behemoth on your behalf and I must know more if we are to avoid being squished by his horny-toed feet!”
Joe Spork shrugs yes, and Mercer tuts.
“Billy called you. You went to meet him.”
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
“He had a job. Clean up and install. I
cleaned it, I looked at it, and it was … different.”
“Define ‘different,’ please. For those of us who weren’t there.”
“Unique. Special. Skilled. Complex. Unfathomable.”
“All right.”
“We went down to Cornwall. The book—Billy called it a doodah—was part of a big mobile sculpture thing. There was a mad bloke who looked after it. I plugged it in. Bees came out.”
“Does the mad bloke have a name?”
“Ted. Ted Sholt. Or he called himself Keeper, like a title.”
Mercer nods. “And bees came out of the sculpture?”
“Mechanical simulacra of bees. There were actual bees as well. Ted keeps them. For company, I think.”
“Did they strike you as in any way remarkable?”
“They existed, that was pretty remarkable. They were expensive. I mean Cartier-bespoke expensive, all right? You remember the Woven Gold?”
“Your grandfather’s thing.”
“They were like that. Stunning. But they didn’t speak in tongues or turn water into wine or fly off into the sunset. They just …” Joe stops talking.
“What?”
“There was a moment when I thought they had. Obviously, they hadn’t.”
“Turned water into wine?”
“Flown away. They’re too heavy. It was the real ones.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“… They were clockwork. Made of gold!”
“So, in fact, you assume.”
“Mercer …”
“Joe, much as I am loath to believe anything I hear through men like Rodney Titwhistle, there is some very significant ordure hitting the fan here. If this really is an old government science project, we have to acknowledge your bees may be more than they appear. Maybe they are nuclear bees or plague bees or some other bloody thing. Certainly, they could be magnetic or rocket-propelled bees. We don’t know.”