City of Spades

9

The Blake Street gamble-house


When I left Mr Vial’s party, I wandered across the silent reaches of Mayfair, which, in the middle night, looked like crissed-crossed canals where the water of life had drained away. In a vast, sad, dramatic square, I paused in the lamp- and moonlight, and gazed at the blue foliage of huge, languishing trees. I took out a cigarette. ‘Light, Mr Pew?’ said someone. ‘You don’t remember me?’ the voice continued. ‘I thought we’d be meeting again before too long.’

‘You’re acting mysteriously, whoever you are. You must be a member of the secret service.’

‘As a matter of fact, that’s what I thought you might possibly be.’

I turned, and saw Detective-Inspector Purity of the CID. He was wearing a tuxedo with a considerable air, had his hands in his coat pockets, and an empty pipe clenched between his teeth. ‘I’m out and about around the clubs tonight,’ he said. ‘Routine check-up, that’s all it is. As I was saying. I know it’s not my concern, but I thought you were doing special work of one kind or another.’

‘Did you?’

He came rather nearer and put the pipe in his breast pocket. ‘It stands to reason, Mr Pew, that someone from the service must be keeping an eye on these coloured folk, and I saw at once an official like yourself wouldn’t be mucking in with them like you did that night we picked you up, unless you had your cover story ready …’

‘If I were what you suggest, of course I wouldn’t tell you.’

‘Naturally … though I could always try to check … But it’s clear as daylight someone is watching these colonials – the troublesome elements among them. First the Maltese come, then the Cypriots, and now this lot! They don’t make the copper’s task any the easier.’

‘You find that colonials are more trouble than the natives?’

‘What natives? Oh, I see what you mean. No, I don’t suppose so, really … but it’s a new problem. When they come unstuck, of course, they get more publicity in the Press than ours do. But I don’t suppose their criminality is out of all proportion … It’s just that they’re there, you see.’

‘I’ll say good night to you.’

‘Yes, I thought we’d be meeting again,’ Inspector Purity said, falling in alongside as I moved away. ‘You’ve been to a party, I expect?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Good one? Jolly? There are some very nice flats around the Marble Arch …’ He stopped a minute. ‘By the way, you didn’t mind me asking you what I did?’

‘About my job? I’ve left the Colonial Department, as it happens.’

‘Yes, I heard that – word gets around.’ He sounded pleased. ‘And now you’re just a private person.’

‘That’s it.’

‘Doing nothing so very special at all, you’d say. Well, that’s interesting to know.’

We went on some way in silence. He had the art which coppers have of inserting his personality, unwelcomed and uninvited, into your own.

‘And how’s young Mr Fortune?’

‘Who?’

‘Come on, now. You know who I’m speaking of.’

I stopped. ‘Is this an official interview?’

‘Not exactly. No, I wouldn’t say so.’

‘Then good night.’

‘So you have seen something of him? I thought perhaps you had. He’s a nice boy, in his way.’ Mr Purity took his hands from his pockets and slapped his flanks. ‘I have my duty to get on with,’ he said briskly. ‘We never rest.’ He walked on ahead and turned the corner. When I reached it, there was no sign of him.

I crossed the neutral ground of Regent Street into the upper regions of Soho. The eighteenth-century houses looked graceful, mouldering and aloof. Beside an electric power station, that had intruded itself among them, I stopped: and wondered whether the time had not now come to ‘cut out’, as Johnny Fortune might have said, from the society of the Spades. They were wonderful, of course – exhilarating: the temperature of your life shot up when in their company. But if you stole some of their physical vitality, you found that the price was they began to invade your soul: or rather, they did not, but your own idea of them did – for they were sublimely indifferent to anything outside themselves! And in spite of their joie de vivre, in any practical sense they were so impossible! ‘They’re dreadful! They’re just quite dreadful!’ I shouted out aloud, above the slight hum of the dynamos.

I turned some corners, and under a lamp saw Africans squatting on their haunches on the pavement. I stepped out on the street to make a circuit, but was hailed by one who ran crying after me, ‘Lend me two pounds, man, or even one!’ It was Johnny’s half-brother, Arthur.

‘Hullo, Arthur. What goes on there?’

‘We’re throwing dice. I lose a bit …’

‘Here in the street?’

‘What’s wrong with here?’

‘Doesn’t anyone interfere?’

‘Oh, we take care. We’re barred at Mr Obo-King’s, you see, and can’t play there.’

‘Mr Obo-King?’

‘He owns the Blake Street gamble-house. You’ll find some people you know there, if you go.’

‘What number in Blake Street is it?’

‘I forget the number, man, but here on this envelope it’s written.’ He pulled out a crumpled one on which I saw:

Mr Arthur,

by the Blake Street Gamble-house,

London, Soho.

The postmark was from Manchester.

‘Somebody wrote this to you there?’

‘Yes, man, a friend. He plays clarinet Moss Side.’

‘And this got delivered?’

‘Oh, everyone knows the gamble-house. It’s raided regular weekends.’

‘Don’t they ever close it?’

‘Why should they, so long as Mr Obo-King pays his fines, and makes his little presents to the Law? Mr Obo owns several places, and they’re never closed. The Law likes to keep them open, so it knows where to look for everybody.’

I gave him ten shillings. ‘Best of luck,’ said.

He snatched it, and cried: ‘Never say “Good luck” to any gambler! You not know that?’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘You see my brother Johnny?’

‘Earlier on.’

‘I must get to meet him again soon. This man owes me everything. I feel real sore about him.’

He ran back to the circle without thanks.

I went on to Blake Street; and only then realised that Arthur’s envelope, after all, had no number on it. I walked up and down, and could find no sign of what looked to be a club, when out of the area steps from a basement I saw a coloured man cautiously emerge and, as he walked towards me, recognised Larry the GI.

‘Man, that sure was some bum evening at Mr Vial’s,’ he said. ‘I pulled out fast when I saw how it was shaping. They was having an orgy when I left, but me, I don’t care for these pig-parties or gang-bangs whatsoever.’

‘Where have you been just now, Larry?’

‘In and out of the gamble-house, to get me some bit of loot.’

‘Did you play in there?’

‘What, me? Among all those Africans when they’re throwing dice? Man, are you crazy? They’d eat me. A soldier can tell dynamite when he sees it.’

‘But you went in there alone?’

‘Oh, no, that Tamberlaine came with me. West Indians I can partly understand, but not these African ancestors of mine.’

‘How did you get the money, then?’

‘Sad – but I had to sell my knife. No other way to get myself back to base. But I’ll find me another there.’ He shook my hands. ‘So I’ll be seeing you,’ he said. ‘Norbert and Moscow has given me your phone number where they’re moving in.’

I walked up the road, and went down the gamble-house steps. The door in the area was open, and there was no one inside to stop you going in. At the end of a dim-lit corridor was another door. I was going to open it, when from inside came shouts and clatterings, two men ran out and started fighting in the area. There was a horrid scream and whimper, and quick, noisy footsteps on the metal stair up to the street. Someone had fallen at the foot of them. I ran over. ‘Can I help you? Are you hurt?’ I cried out.

By the light from the inner door, I could see this man was bleeding. He tilted his face, and I saw Jimmy Cannibal. He gave me a look of intense dislike, crawled to his feet, and lurched slowly up the stair. A voice from behind me said, ‘Who’s you?’

I turned, and saw a very fat man in a fur-lined jerkin.

‘That boy’s been wounded. What should we do?’

He said nothing, and struck a match under the stair. I saw him pick up a knife. He looked at me, still holding it. ‘Who’s you?’ he said again.

‘A friend of Johnny Fortune’s.’

‘I think I hear about you. What did you see out here?’

‘You know what I saw. A fight.’

‘Is best you saw nothing.’ He picked up a piece of newspaper, and wrapped the knife in it. ‘Who did attack him? You saw that?’

‘No. It was too quick.’

‘Is best you saw nothing, then. You come inside now?’

‘I don’t think I will.’

‘Best you come in till they scatter up there in the street. Give them the time to scatter.’

He propelled me in, and shut the outer door. We stood in the dim corridor.

‘How’s Johnny? That boy got some loot again just now?’

‘Not much.’

‘He ought to get some, then. A boy like him could make some easy, and then lose it all to me.’ He let out a laugh as big as his body. ‘And you, are you loaded?’

‘I have some money, yes.’

‘Come inside, then. I give you some good excitement before you say goodbye to it.’

‘Are you Mr Obo-King?’

‘That’s what they call me. They should so, is my name.’

He led the way into a large room with little chairs and tables where chicken and rice and foo-foo were being served. Some boys were playing a juke-box, and Mr Obo-King called to one of them, ‘Take a bucket out there, man. There’s some mess to wash away.’ He turned again to me. ‘The gambling’s through here. In this next door.’

‘I’ll come in later. I want to eat.’

Mr Obo-King looked at me. ‘Then come later. I give you some good excitement before I skin you.’

I sat down, asked for foo-foo, and looked around. Some of the men and women were dressed like birds of paradise, so that you’d turn and look at them in the street; though down here they seemed right enough, in spite of the resolute squalor of the place, and even though other customers were in the last degrees of destitution. A few seemed to have camped there for the night, for they’d kipped down on window-shelves and tables, snoring, or dreaming, possibly, of ‘back home’. A short boy with a pale blue-green pasty face and enormous eyes came up and said, ‘Buy me a meal, man.’ As I called for it, he suddenly lifted his sweater and showed me, on his naked stomach underneath, an enormous lump. ‘Hospital can do nothing – what is the future?’ he said, and carried his plate away. From time to time customers emerged, always disconsolate, from the gambling room, and started long public post-mortems on their disasters. Soon the West Indian Tamberlaine came out, and said to the company in general, ‘Well, I not had much, see, so I not lose much.’ He spotted me, and accepted an offer of coffee. ‘So voodoo is not for you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you like this place better.’

‘Who comes here mostly, Mr Tamberlaine?’

‘If white like yourself, they’s wreckage of jazz musicians, chiefly, a lot on the needle and full of despair; if coloured, well, ponces and other hustlers like myself.’

‘You’re a hustler, then?’

‘You might say I pimp around the town, picking the pounds up where I can. I don’t often gamble, though, because the winner is the table, and like all these boys I never know when to stop if fortune does the bitch on me like she do. But coloureds like gambling, don’t you see – it’s part of our carefree nature.’

He gave me a sarcastic grin. ‘Who gambles mostly?’ I said. ‘Africans or West Indians?’

‘What! You recognise some difference? Ain’t we all just coal-black coloured skins to you?’

‘Don’t be offensive, Mr Tamberlaine. Like so many West Indians I’ve met, you seem to have, if I may say so, a large chip sitting on your shoulder.’

‘Not like your African friends? They have less chip, you say?’

‘Much less. Africans seem much more self-assured, more self-sufficient. They don’t seem to fear we’re going to take liberties with them, or patronise them, as you people do.’

‘Do we now!’

‘Yes, you do. Africans don’t seem to care what anyone thinks of them. So even though they’re more clannish and secretive, they’re easier to talk to.’

Mr Tamberlaine considered this. ‘Listen to me, man,’ he said. ‘If we’s more sensitive like you say, there’s reasons for it. Our islands is colonies of great antiquity, and our mother tongue is English, like your own, and not some dialects. So naturally we expect you treat us like we’re British as yourself, and when you don’t, we suffer and go sour. Why should we not? But Africans – what do they care of British? For African, his passport just don’t mean nothing, except for travel, but for us it’s loyalty.’

I couldn’t resist a dig. I’d had, after all, to take so many myself in recent months. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘it’s easier for them than it is for you. They know what they are, and you’re not sure. They belong much more deeply to Africa than you do to the Caribbean.’

‘My ears is pointed in your direction,’ said Mr Tamberlaine, sipping his coffee, ‘for some more ripe instruction.’

‘Here it comes, then. They speak their own private tongues, their lives are rooted in their ancient tribes, so that even when they’re lonely or miserable here they feel they’re sustained by the solid tribal past at home. But you, you’re wanderers, cut off by centuries from Africa where you first came from, and ready to move off again from your stepping-stones strung out across the sea.’

‘Our islands is stepping-stones? Thank you now, for what you call them so.’

‘Wouldn’t you all move on to North or South America, if they’d let you in?’

‘Well, yes, perhaps we would, the way they treat us here, and how it is back home.’

‘You see, then. You’re not sure what you are – African, Caribbean, or American – and so you’re quite ready to be British.’

‘Thank you for the compliment to our patriotism. So many of our boy who serve in RAF would gladly hear your words.’

I saw the conversation wasn’t a success, and apologised to Mr Tamberlaine. ‘I’m just saying what I think – excuse me if it gives offence.’

Mr Tamberlaine smiled politely. ‘Is no offence, man. You say what’s in your mind, and that’s your liberty. What’s certain, anyway, is that we’re different, Africans and we. We don’t mix much, except when we stand shoulder to shoulder against the white.’

He got up, put on his tailored duffel coat, and said, ‘Now I must get out in the cold and do me pimpin’. You’re not interested in anything I have to offer, I suppose?’

‘Such as what, Mr Tamberlaine?’

‘A little coloured lady for you? You go with her, and add to your education of these different races.’

‘All right. Is it far?’

‘We go down Brixton way, man, and see there. I hope you have money for the taxi, there’s no all-night bus.’